The Sleep of Reason (19 page)

Over breakfast we decided on nine o’clock. But when I tried his office, I heard that he had been in hospital since six. “Mr Mansel gets on without much sleep,” said his secretary, with proprietorial pride. I could get him there: which, fretted by the delays, in time I did.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t arrive home till late last night. They gave me your message.” The voice was brisk, light, professional. “What’s gone wrong with your eye?”

I told him. “That’s a very clear description,” the voice said with approval, rather as though I were a medical student walking the wards and making a report. I had better see him that morning. He was doing an operation at 9.30. He would be at Harley Street by 11.30. Too early for me?

No, not too early, we thought as the minutes dragged. I couldn’t block out the bad eye enough to read the newspapers. Margaret went through them for me: nothing much: a Kennedy speech: oh yes, the body of that child who was missing, the one in your home town, that’s just been found, poor boy: an old acquaintance called Lord Bridgwater (once Horace Timberlake) had died on Saturday. We were not interested. Margaret sat beside me in silence and held my hand.

Just as, still silent, she held my hand in the taxi on the way to Harley Street. It was only a quarter-of-an-hour’s trip from the north side of the park. We hadn’t been able to discipline ourselves; we arrived at 11.10. No, Mr Mansel wasn’t in yet: empty waiting-room, the smell of magazines, old furniture, the smell of waiting. All Margaret said was that, when he examined me, she wanted to be there.

At last the secretary entered, comely, hygienic, and led us in. Mansel was standing up, greeting me like a young man to an older; the room was sparkling with optical instruments, and Mansel himself was as sharp as an electronic engineer. Although our sons were in the same year at school, he was not more than forty, tall, thin, handsome in an avian fashion. Did he mind my wife staying? Not in the least. He showed her to a chair, me to another beside his desk. He had in front of him a card about me, name, age, address, clearly filled up: he asked a question.

“Should you say your general health was good?”

I hesitated. “I suppose so,” I said with reluctance, as though I were tempting fate.

No illnesses? Latest medical examination? Long ago. “Then we won’t waste any time on that,” he said with impersonal cheerfulness, and chose, out of a set of gadgets, what looked no more complicated than a single lens. Left eye? Firm fingers on my cheek, lens inches away, face close to mine. His eyes, preternaturally large, like a close-up on the screen, peered down: one angle, another, a third.

He took perhaps a minute, maybe less.

“It’s quite straightforward,” he said. “You’ve got a detached retina.”

“Thank God for that,” I heard Margaret say.

“As a matter of fact,” he said coolly, “I could have diagnosed it over the telephone.”

“If you had,” I said, sarcastic with relief, “it would have saved us a bad couple of hours.”

“Why, what did you think it was?”

Margaret and I glanced at each other with something like shame. Ridiculous fears we hadn’t spoken. Fears uninformed. Fears out of the medical dictionary. Brain tumour, and the rest.

Mansel was speaking as though cross with us.

“I understand. It’s easy to imagine things.” Actually, he was cross with himself. He hadn’t been sensitive enough. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He wasn’t only a technician, I thought, he was a good doctor. From her corner by the surgical couch, Margaret broke out: “Mr Rochester.”

“What?” I said.

“He must have had exactly your condition. Don’t you remember?”

The point seemed to me well taken. Mansel found this conversation incomprehensible, and got down to business. He would have to operate, of course. What were the chances? I asked. Quite good. Statistically, I pressed him. Not worse than 75 per cent, not better than 85 per cent, he said with singular confidence. I wasn’t to expect too much: they ought to be able to give me back peripheral vision.

“What does that mean?”

“You won’t be able to read with it. But you’ll have some useful sight.”

If he could have operated on Saturday, he said, in an objective tone, just after the eye went, he might possibly have done better: it was too late now. Still, he had better get me into hospital that afternoon, and perform next morning.

“That’s a little difficult,” I said. To myself, my voice sounded as objective as his. I felt collected, exaggeratedly collected, as though, after the anticlimax, I had to compete on equal terms.

“Why is it difficult?”

I said that I had an engagement on Wednesday which I was anxious to keep. He interrogated me. I explained that I wouldn’t have thought twice about the formal ceremony at the university, but there was a Court meeting which I had given a serious promise to attend. Margaret, her face intent but hard to read, knew that I was referring to Vicky and her father.

“Some promises have to be broken,” said Mansel.

“I’ve got some responsibility this time. Some personal responsibility, you understand.”

“Well, I can’t judge that. But I’ve got to give you medical advice. You ought to have this operation tomorrow. The longer we put it off, the worse the chances are. I’ve got to tell you that.”

He was a strong-willed man. Somehow I had half-memories of the times I had clashed with men like this, both struggling for what I used to think of as the moral initiative.

“I’m not going to be unreasonable,” I said. “But you must be definite about the chances. Is that fair?”

“I’ll be as definite as I can.”

“If we delay three days, what difference will it really make?”

“Some.”

“Would it, say, halve the chances? In that case, of course, it’s off.”

His will was crossed by his professional honesty. He gave a frosty smile.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Well then. Can you put it into figures again? Tomorrow you said it would be an 8o per cent chance. What would it be on Thursday?”

“A little worse.”

“How much worse?” I said.

“Perhaps 10 per cent.”

“Not more than 10 per cent?” I went on, “Less rather than more?”

“Yes,” said Mansel without palaver. “I should say that was true. Less rather than more.”

Then I asked, would he mind if I had a word with my wife alone? With his courtesy which was both professional and youthful, he said that he would be delighted: he was sure she would be the wisest of us all.

We looked into the waiting-room, but there were by now several people in it. So, her fingers interwoven with mine, we walked up and down the pavement outside the house. The mist had lifted, the air was pearly bright.

“Well,” I said, “what do I do?”

“I must say,” said Margaret, “I’d be happier to see you tucked up in hospital.”

“And yet, if you were me, you wouldn’t even hesitate, would you?”

“That’s a bit unkind.”

“No. The idea that you wouldn’t take a tiny bit of risk–”

She understood, without question, that I wasn’t being quixotic, as she might have been. If she had been asked, she might have said that I was showing defiance, taking my revenge for feeling helpless. In both of us as we grew older, there emerged a streak of recklessness which she had always had and which I loved in her. But this wasn’t a time, we took it for granted, to discuss motives. We had both got tired of the paralysis of subjectivism, when every action became about as good or about as bad as any other, provided that you could lucubrate it away.

She knew that if she asked me to go into hospital that night, I should do so. She understood me, and didn’t ask.

We returned to Mansel’s consulting-room. He stood up, polite and active, looking expectantly at Margaret.

“No,” I said. “I’m at your service any time from Thursday morning.”

“Right,” said Mansel, without a blink or sign of disapproval. “You’ll go in some time that afternoon, will you? I’ll deal with you early on Friday.”

WITH Margaret there to look after me, I arrived at the university robing-room half-an-hour before the morning ceremony. She had fitted me with a patch which shut out my left eye, and when Francis Getliffe saw it – he was already dressed in his cancellarial regalia – he walked across to us, frowning with concern. When Margaret explained what had happened, he said angrily: “You ought never to have come.”

“Francis,” I said, “you know perfectly well why I’ve come.” On the agenda for the Court that afternoon, over which he was to preside, there was an innocent-looking item standing in his son’s name. Shaw still hadn’t picked up the significance, so far as I had heard: but Francis knew, so did the group of young professors, and so did I.

We couldn’t speak any more, the room was bumbling with a kind of Brownian movement of human beings in fancy dress. Scarlet hoods, azure hoods, chef-like hats of French universities: hoods of this university, all invented by Shaw himself, one of which, the DSc, was a peculiarly startling yellow-gold. Soon I was in fancy dress myself, regarding the scene with monocular detachment: I could see perfectly well, as well as with two eyes, but somehow the sheer fact of physical accident kept me in a bubble of my own. People I knew, Shaw, Leonard Getliffe, Geary, did not look quite real. Nor did my old acquaintance, Lord Lufkin, who, since he was to be invested with a hood later in the morning, stood subfusc, among the blur of colours, in a black gown. He was well into his seventies by this time, and had at last been persuaded, or perhaps financially coerced, into retiring. But that hadn’t taken the edge off his public persona. He had taken to going about with someone I saw at his side in this milling, behooded mob; a man of fifty who acted as something like Lufkin’s herald, producing pearls of wisdom from Lufkin’s past, while the master himself stood by in non-participating silence.

That morning we came together in the crush. Untypically, Lufkin kissed Margaret’s cheek. “I’m glad to see your charming bride,” said Lufkin, who disapproved of American business idioms and often used them.

He was not above taking an interest in my misfortunes. Once more we had to explain.

“If they’re going to use the knife on you,” said Lufkin creakingly, “you’d better get the best man in London. I always believe in getting the best man in London.”

“He’s always said that,” said the herald, pink-faced, well-tubbed, plump beside his hero’s bones.

“Who is your man, then?” Lufkin said.

I produced the name of Mansel.

“Never heard of him,” said Lufkin, as though that removed Mansel from the plane of all created things.

After a patch of conversational doldrums, he had another thought.

“I have it,” he said. He turned to the herald. “Go and ring up —” Lufkin gave the name of the President of the Royal College of Surgeons – “and find out how this fellow’s thought of.”

The herald trotted off. The curious thing was, as Margaret and I had discovered, that he was a successful solicitor, and not Lufkin’s solicitor at that. He had appointed himself Lufkin’s handyman, not for money or any other sort of benefit (Lufkin’s patronage had gone by now), but just because he loved it.

Lufkin considered that he had done his duty to me, and passed on. His parting shot, as he gazed at some honorary graduands, was: “I never have believed in giving people degrees they haven’t worked for.”

In which case, one would have thought, he ought not to have been present to receive one himself that morning. Most men would have thought so: but not Lufkin.

The academic procession got into line, a mace-bearer led us, caps dipping, hoods glaring, into the university hall. It might have been any one of two thousand academic processions that year in the English-speaking world, all copied, or not so much copied as refabricated, from processions of corporations of clergymen four hundred years before. It wasn’t really a tradition, it was manmade. Manmade, not woman-made, Margaret used to say: women couldn’t have kept their faces straight long enough to devise colleges and clubs, the enclaves and rituals which men took shelter in.

Anyway, with solemnity this particular ritual pattered on. We climbed up the steps on to the platform, we took off our caps to Francis Getliffe, Francis Getliffe took off his cap to us. We sat down. For a moment or two the order of proceedings was interrupted, for some students had become amused by the patch over my eye and started to cheer. Then Francis Getliffe delivered the invocation: more standing up, sitting down, taking off of caps.

At last the public orator was beginning to make his speech in praise of Lufkin. The orator stood towards the edge of the dais, and Lufkin, standing opposite, did not turn his face towards him. Lufkin just remained there, immutable, with an assessing expression – just as he used to sit at his own table, in the days of his industrial power, surrounded by his court of cherubim and seraphim. He listened now, as he used to listen then, to the story of his virtues and achievements, as though he could, if he felt inclined, point out where certain important features were being omitted. About his virtues, Lufkin’s view of his own character was different from any other person’s: about his achievements, the maddening thing was, he was right. He made his claims for himself, and he sounded like, and perhaps sometimes was, a megalomaniac: yet objectively the claims were a little less than the truth.

Lufkin was duly hooded, the citations fluted on, an orientalist was being celebrated: I was only half-listening, with my eye regarding David Rubin, whose turn was still to come. At each academic pun, a smile crossed his clever sad Disraelian face. One might have thought that he enjoyed this kind of jocularity or that he was intoxicated by the occasion, never having been honoured before. If one did think either of those things, one couldn’t have been more wrong. I had known him for a good many years, and I sometimes thought that I now knew him less than at our first meeting: but I did know one thing about him. He felt, underneath his beautiful courtesy, that his time was being wasted unless it was spent in his own family or with one or two colleagues whom he accepted as his equals. He had been adviser to governments, he had had all the honours in his own profession, he was courted by the smart, and he was so unassuming that they believed they were doing him a favour: it must have seemed, people said, a long way from his Yiddish momma in Brooklyn. Not a bit of it. His skin was like parchment, there were panda-like colorations under his eyes, he had never looked satisfied either with existence or himself. But, satisfied or not, Rubin was one of the aristocrats of this world. He walked among us, he was superlatively polite, and (like Margaret’s forebears) he didn’t give a damn.