Pat might be said to have outstayed his welcome, if there had been any welcome. Talking cheerfully, the bounce and sparkle not diminishing, he stayed until Margaret herself had to leave. But there had been, aided by alcohol, some truce of amicability in the room. Margaret had taken another drink, and Pat several more. It was I who was left out: for to me, who wasn’t yet drinking, there might be amicability in the room, but there was also an increasing smell of whisky.
Later that night, when I had been put back to bed, the telephone rang on the bedside table. Gropingly, my hand got hold of the receiver. It was Margaret.
‘I don’t want to worry you, but I think you’d better know. It’s not serious, but it’s rather irritating.’
Normally, I should have demanded the news at once. But in the calm in which I was existing, as yet inexplicable to me but nevertheless very happy, I wasn’t in a hurry. I asked if it were anything to do with Charles, and Margaret said no. I said: ‘You needn’t mind about worrying me, you know.’
‘Well,’ came her voice, ‘there’s an item in one of the later editions. I think I’d better read it, hadn’t I?’
‘Go ahead.’
The item, Margaret told me, occurred in a new-style gossip column, copied from New York. It read something to the effect that I had been undergoing optical surgery, and that there had been complications which had caused ‘grave concern’.
When she rang up to break the news, Margaret assumed that this would enrage and worry me. She had seen me and others close to me secretive about their health. One of the first lessons you learned in any sort of professional life was that you should never be ill. It reduced your mana. When I was a young man, and just attracting some work at the Bar, I had been told that I was seriously ill. I had gone to extreme lengths to conceal it: if I had died, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – and if, as it turned out, I didn’t, well then I had been right.
Nowadays I was removed from the official life: but even to a writer it did harm – an impalpable superstitious discreditable harm – if people heard that your death was near. You were already on the way to being dispensed with. The way they talked about you – ‘did you know, poor old X seems to be finished’ – was dismissive rather than cruel, though there was a twist of gloating there, showing through their self-congratulation that they were still right in the middle of the mortal scene.
So Margaret anticipated that this bit of news would harass me – and, before I went into hospital, she would have been right. Now it didn’t. I said: ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’
‘We’d better do something, hadn’t we?’
I was reflecting. The lessons I had learned seemed very distant; but still they had been learned, and one might as well not throw them away.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose we’d better be prudent. I’ll make Christopher Mansel send out a bulletin.’
‘Shall I talk to him tonight?’
‘It can wait until he comes in tomorrow morning.’
When Margaret had rung off, I lay in bed, not thinking of Mansel’s bulletin, but contentedly preoccupied with a problem that gave me a certain pleasure. Whoever had leaked that news? It couldn’t be the doctors. It couldn’t be my family. Someone in the hospital? Just possibly. Someone whom Margaret had talked to, trying to enlist visitors for me? Possibly.
No, the answer was too easy. There was one person who stood out, beautifully probable. Motive, opportunity, the lot. I would have bet heavily on my nephew Pat. He had his contacts with the young journalists. Once or twice before, our doings had been speculated about knowledgeably in the gossip columns. Pat was not above receiving a pound or two as a linkman. There was not much which Pat was above.
The next morning, as Mansel said good morning, I told him about the rumour and said that I wanted him to correct it.
‘Right, sir. There are one or two things first, though.’
After he had examined the left eye, he said: ‘Promising.’ He paused, like a minister answering a supplementary question, wanting to give satisfaction, so long as it wasn’t the final commitment: ‘I think I can say we shall be unlucky if anything goes wrong this time.’
Quick fingers, and the eye was shut into darkness again.
‘That’ll do, I think.’ Mansel was gazing at me as though he had made an excellent joke.
‘What about the other eye?’ I said.
‘You can have that, if you like.’ He gave a short allocution. What I had said the day before was what he expected most patients to say. He had already decided to leave the good eye unblinded. It was more convenient to have me in hospital for a few more days: I should stand it better if I had an eye to see with. The advantages of blinding both eyes probably wasn’t worth the psychological wear and tear. ‘I’m pretty well convinced’, said Mansel, ‘that we’ve got to learn to do these operations and leave you one working eye right from the start.’
I said that I should like to stand him a drink, but in his profession, at 6.45 in the morning, that didn’t seem quite appropriate. I said also that, if he would leave me one eye, he could go through the entire eye operation again. Without any frills or additions, however.
Mansel was scrutinising me.
‘You could face it again, could you?’
‘If it’s not going to happen, one can face anything.’
He seemed to make another entry in his mental notebook – behaviour of patient, after being allowed vision.
‘Well, sir, what about this statement? That’s really your department, not mine, you know.’ It was true, he was not so brisk, masterful and masterly when he sat down and started to compose.
Ballpoint pen tapping his teeth, he stayed motionless, like Henry James in search of the exact, the perfect, the unique word. After a substantial interval, at least fifteen minutes, he said, with unhabitual diffidence, with a touch of pride: ‘How will this do?’
He read out the name of the hospital, and then–
Sir Lewis Eliot entered this hospital on 27 November, and next day an operation was performed for a retinal detachment in the left eye. As a result there are good prospects that the eye will be restored to useful vision. During the course of the operation, Sir Lewis underwent a cardiac arrest. This was treated in a routine manner. In all respects, Sir Lewis’ progress and condition are excellent.
‘Well, Christopher,’ I said, ‘no one could call you a sensational writer.’
‘I think that says all that’s necessary.’
‘Cardiac arrest, that’s what you call it, is it?’
I hadn’t heard the phrase before. Though, by a coincidence, when my eye first went wrong, two years earlier, I had been reminded of an older phrase, ‘arrest of life’. Perhaps that was too melodramatic for a black veil over half an eye. This time, it didn’t seem so.
‘After all,’ I remarked absently to Mansel, ‘one doesn’t have too many.’
‘Too many what?’
‘Arrests of life.’
‘Cardiac arrests is what we say. No, of course not, most people only have one.’ Unfussed, he went off to telephone the bulletin to the Press Association, while I got up, self-propelled again, and, being able to see, was also able to eat. It was a luxury to sit, free from the solipsistic darkness, and just gaze out of the window – though, even as the sky lightened, it was still a leaden morning, and bedroom lamps were being switched on, high up in the houses opposite.