The Sleep of Reason (23 page)

“No, nothing bad.” I went on carefully, as though my words might be quoted or as though I were touching wood: “The eye seems to have cleared itself up. At least, there doesn’t seem to be any black veil this morning.”

She cried out: “What can you see?”

“I can see a bit. Not very well. But anyway I do seem to have a full field of vision.”

It might be temporary, I warned her, trying to warn myself. In fact, for a couple of days past, I had been wondering each time when I squinted past the patch, where the black edge had gone to. Just for the moment, the eye appeared to be behaving something as Mansel had promised me it would, if the operation worked. I could see the shape of the room, Margaret’s face, I could make out the letters in the masthead of
The
Times
, nothing else. Above all, there was no blackness pressing in. That made me hopeful, unrealistically in relation to what the eye could do.

“It would be better than nothing.” Again I was choosing the words.

Margaret also was trying to be cautious. Action was neutral, action didn’t mean false hope: the best thing she could do was telephone Mansel. He could come at half past one, she reported. Margaret and I talked the morning away, waiting until he arrived, spotless as David Rubin, always busy, never in a hurry, sacrificing the solitary sandwich and the half-hour off in his obsessive day.

Lying flat, I assisted (in the French sense) in the familiar routine. The lens, the scrutinising eye. It went on longer than usual, longer than the morning of decision four days before.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Mansel. He broke out: “Look, I am glad! You’re quite right. The retina has got itself back somehow.”

He had spoken simply, like one who was enjoying someone else’s good luck. Then he became professional once more, professional with a problem on his mind.

“You haven’t got much to thank me for. I think you ought to understand that. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. By all the rules that retina ought to be floating about. But there’s a great deal we don’t understand in this business. We’re really only at the beginning. It’s a great deal more hit-and-miss than it ought to be. I hope it will be a bit more scientific before I’ve finished.”

He was preoccupied with the problem, absent-minded as he gave me instructions. Inspections. This might be a fluke, he had better see me within the week. Premonitory symptoms, flashes of light before going to sleep: I must see him at once. His mind still absent upon the physics of the retina, he told me to avoid any risk of knocks on the head – such as in boxing or association football. I said mildly that those risks weren’t in my case so very serious. Mansel had the grace to give a sheepish youthful grin.

“You must think I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. He said it with the detachment of a man who knew that he was a master of his job: and who assumed that I knew it too.

After he had departed, Margaret burst out crying. Her nerves were strong when we were in trouble. Trouble over, she was left with the aftermath. Comforting her, I didn’t feel any aftermath at all. This had been an arrest of life. It was already over. I went for a walk in the park that afternoon, looking with mescalin-sharp pleasure (sometimes shutting my good eye) at the autumn grass. I felt full of energy, eager to escape from the solipsistic bubble in which I had been immersed for those last days. Life goes on, young Charles had told me consolingly after we paid that visit to my father. Had he ever heard of an arrest of life? When would he know one? Anyway, it was time to get back into the flow.

Though I didn’t often write in the evening, I put in a couple of hours’ work before dinner. Later, I was busy with the letters that had stayed unread. Often I became irked by claims upon my time, other people’s dilemmas: not that night. I was back with them again.

As I read, I called out the news to Margaret. Nothing to vex either of us, as it happened. Just the balm of getting back into good nick, as Martin and the other games players used to say. A note from Maurice’s tutor – no, nothing worrying, in fact he seemed to be doing a little better. W— (the tutor) would like a chat about future plans for him, just that. Margaret wasn’t listening to any arrangements of W—’s: she was suffused with a tender, unprotected, abjectly-loving smile. At the most vestigial suggestion of good news – practical good news – about Maurice, she blushed as she did when she was first in love. How did one become a favourite child? Why had I, not Martin, been my own mother’s? Margaret loved young Charles because he was himself and because he was mine. But she took his academic skill for granted, just as she did her own. She could judge his ability with detachment. After all, she came from a family of professionals, where, when one got a first, someone like her father or one of his brothers came up and said, Well, it’s nice for you to know you’re not altogether a fool. Maurice she loved, though, with all her tenacious passion. She loved him in a light of his own. She responded like the simplest mother who had scarcely heard of universities and who was bedazzled to find her child was there. If Maurice could struggle through to any kind of degree she would be so proud.

Yes, of course I would see W—, I was saying. But I wasn’t prepared to go out of London yet awhile. After the past fortnight, I needed to get back into my own particular nick. Four hours’ work from 10 a.m. each morning, no lunch anywhere. Then I was at anyone’s disposal for the rest of the day. W— could call the next time he was in London.

Margaret blushed again. When I took the most prosaic administrative step on Maurice’s behalf, she was over-grateful. She asked if I had got through my pile of letters, and then produced another from her bag. “This is from Vicky,” she said. “I wasn’t to trouble you with it unless you were quite well.”

She went on: “She rang up this afternoon. When you were out on your walk. She’s been ringing up every day.”

As she handed me the letter, she said: “If you’d been free, you know, that girl would have fallen for you.”

“No,” I said, “for once you’re wrong.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“No, you’re not jealous, but you’re wrong.”

Margaret was happy, affectionate and obstinate. In snatches as I went through the letter, I persisted: I should have been the first to know. What Vicky needed was not someone to love (we had seen her taste), but a father to talk to. If a young woman had Arnold Shaw as a father, it wasn’t entirely unnatural that she should need to talk to someone else.

The letter was actually concerned with Arnold. I wasn’t to make any effort until I had had a holiday (Vicky could not resist giving me some medical advice). But afterwards, if I could talk to people at the university before the Lent term Court it might be a precaution. As far as she could gather, feeling hadn’t changed. The last Court meeting had gained time, but hadn’t altered the situation.

“I must say,” I cried, “everything seems preposterously normal!”

At the end of her letter, Vicky wrote that she might be coming to London before Christmas, but she wasn’t sure.

“That means that she’s hoping he will ask her,” said Margaret. “That’s normal, too.”

We looked at the big round handwriting, the oddly stilted, official-sounding phrases. “I wonder what her love letters are like?” said Margaret. Sitting together on the sofa, we discussed whether there was anything we could do for her. Of course there wasn’t. But it was a luxury to show concern. To be just to us both, we each felt some concern. We were fond of her, and respected her. Yet, warming us both that night, there was an element of
suave mari magno
. We were on the shore, watching the rough sea and someone else being tossed about in the storm. We had been through it ourselves, alone and together. That night we were by ourselves, in our own home, trouble past. It was a luxury to show concern.

Back in the flow, it wasn’t long before I was talking to Francis Getliffe about the university quarrels. It happened in a private room at Brown’s Hotel. We were attending a dinner party, but not a social one. We had been attending that same kind of dinner party for a good many years past. This was a group of eminent scientists, in which I was included because I had worked with them for so long. They had been meeting several times a year to produce ideas on scientific policy. They were entertained, with some lavishness, by a wealthy businessman who was both sweet-natured and a passionate follower of the opposition politicians. The scientists didn’t pay much attention to the lavishness, being most of them abstemious: but they were interested in the politicians, for by that autumn it was certain that there would be an election next year and probable that the opposition would win it. This group of scientists had been men of the left all their lives; and they still hoped that, if that happened, some good things could be done.

There they sat round the table, our host’s good wine going, very slowly, down uncomprehending crops. Constantine, his head splendid and at the same time Pied Piperish: Mounteney, granitic, determined not to be appeased: Francis Getliffe: Walter Luke: my brother Martin: several more: our host and a couple of the opposition front bench. Most of the scientists had international reputations, two were Nobel prize winners, and all except Martin were Fellows of the Royal. At one instant, while Constantine was talking – which didn’t differentiate it from a good many other instants – I had a sense that I had been here before.

I was seeing the haze of faces as in a bad group picture – striking faces most of them – of my old acquaintances. Very old acquaintances: for they had all (and I along with them) been at common purposes for getting on for thirty years. We had, as young men, sat round tables like this, though not such expensive ones, trying to alarm people about Hitler: then preparing ourselves for war: then, when the war came, immersing ourselves in it. That had been, in the domain of action, their apotheosis. They had never been so effective before or since. But they hadn’t given up. Nearly all of them had risked unpopularity. Some, most of all Constantine, had paid a price. Some, like Francis Getliffe, had become respectable, though politically unchanged. The truth was that the youngest at the table was Martin, a year off fifty. Why was the evening such a feat of survival? There was scientific ability about, comparable with theirs, but either the younger professionals didn’t take their public risks, or there was something in the climate which didn’t let such rough-hewn characters emerge.

That night, they didn’t sound in the least like sheer survivals. There were candles lit on the dinner table, but they insisted on the full lights above. One or two, like Francis Getliffe, were talking good political sense. As usual, Mounteney didn’t infer, but impersonally pronounced, that if the politicians and I were eliminated, then some progress might be made. Two of the less cantankerous had brought memoranda with them. The chief politician was listening to everyone: he was as clever as they were, yet when they were at their most positive he didn’t argue, but stowed the ideas away. They thought they were using him: he thought he could use some of them. That made for general harmony. All in all, I decided, it wasn’t a wasted evening.

After the rest had gone, Francis and Martin, not so frugal as their colleagues, stayed with me for a final drink. But Martin, when I mentioned Arnold Shaw, did not take any part in the conversation. He and Francis, though they were sometimes allies, were not friends. There had always been a constraint between them, and now, for a simple reason, it was added to. Francis had come to know of the misery that Vicky was causing his son. Francis also knew that she was infatuated with Pat, whom he thought a layabout. In all that imbroglio, Francis could not help remembering that Pat was Martin’s son: and – with total unfairness from a fair-minded man – he had come to put the blame on Martin and regard him with an extra degree of chill.

As I tentatively brought in the name of Arnold Shaw, I got a response from Francis which surprised me. In his own house in the spring, he had had no patience with me. This night, sitting by the littered table in Brown’s, he answered with care and sympathy. “Of course,” he said, “I still think you overrate the old buffer. You’re putting yourself out too much, I’m certain you are. But that’s your lookout–”

I said that I hadn’t any special illusions about Arnold: but I didn’t want him to be pushed out in a hurry, hustled out by miscellaneous dislike.

“Leonard doesn’t dislike him,” Francis was saying. “He thinks he’s a damned bad Vice-Chancellor, but otherwise he’s rather fond of him.”

He looked at me with a considerate smile, and went on: “I don’t believe you’re going to alter the situation there. It’s gone too deep. But what do you really want?”

I replied, I too accepted that there wouldn’t be peace until Arnold left. The decent course was to make it tolerable for him, to ease him out, with a touch of gratitude, over the next three years.

Francis shrugged. “Nice picture,” he said. But, in a friendly fashion, he continued: “Look, I think the only hope is for him to come to terms with the young Turks. I don’t imagine it will work, mind you, but I’m sure it’s the only hope.” That is, according to Francis, Shaw would have to take the initiative (as anyone fit to be in charge of an institution, he added tartly, would have done long ago). He would have to face Leonard and his colleagues, no holds barred. They were used to harsh argument, they would respect him for it. Couldn’t I pass on the word, that this was worth trying? “You know, if he doesn’t try it,” said Francis, “there’ll be the most God-almighty row.”

Francis was speaking as though he were on my side: yet in principle he wasn’t. And when he disagreed in principle, he wasn’t often as sympathetic as this. It occurred to me that he might be affected by my physical misadventure. Most people when you were incapacitated or ill tended insensibly to write you off. They took care of you in illness, but did less for you in action. Your mana had got less. With a few men, particularly with strong characters like Francis – perhaps by a deliberate effort – the reverse was true. They seemed to behave, or tried to behave, as though your mana had increased.