Say the present is the epilimnion, then, of this book; as we swim it so we shall feel the changing temperatures of the past rise up, the weed brush our legs; we may or may not sense schools of trout or a biding long-jawed pike. All over this house are pairs of spectacles, many of them purchased for one pound each at a Pound Shop in a subway under Basingstoke. None of these spectacles came with a prescription. I just like to have a pair of specs to hold and fiddle with and put on and wave around as though I were a person who could see. In my old life, before blindness, I had only just started to wear reading glasses, as was normal for my age. Before that, I was always seeing, watching, gorging my eyes.

What is enough to see?

What is enough to look for?

For the last two days, I have been conducting an experiment, and attempting to use my ears to catch secrets and the almost unheard, as, I realise, I used to use my eyes. Of course I’ve always eavesdropped; it’s a form of collecting irresistible to the spy side of being a writer. But I’m trying now to hear and listen supernaturally, around corners, within trees, into birds’ nests, right into the egg within the nest. So far it hasn’t come up to the level my seeing skills were at when they departed. That sounds ungrateful; I’m aware that it will take another fifty-three years to tune my hearing skills up; I’m just a hatching tuning fork, like the one emerging from the lyrebird’s egg drawn by my father larger than life size with his Flo-Master pen on the basement wall in Warriston Crescent after another row with my mother.

So far, my only auditory revelation occurred in a doctor’s waiting room. Unless I’m with Liv or asleep or actually with a doctor, these waiting rooms are where I spend my days. I was in a department of Guy’s Hospital that is a house built upon the place where Keats did his medical training, opposite the Old Operating Theatre whose motto is COMPASSIONE NON MERCEDE, near London Bridge. I heard three pieces of scaffolding being conjoined and the dead sound was exactly that of a wooden xylophone; distance had turned metal to wood.

Occasionally, fashion demands that very pretty people wear spectacles for what is called in the world of magazines a ‘story’. This is the run of editorial pages with some ostensible narrative connection using the same model or group of models. Sometimes film stars wear specs not on account of their trouble with seeing but on account of how they wish to be seen. They may for all we know be short-sighted, but these are specs for being seen in. Today, the left-hand lens has fallen out of my favourite pair of such specs. That’s what my specs are. They are all a put-on.

I trod upon what I thought must be a very thick and large toenail with my bare foot. I felt around and realigned my mind. The only sort of animal whose toenail it could be simply could not have fitted into this flat. I thought directly of our Latvian lodger, who often babysat me. That’s how my mother was able sometimes to leave me, I remembered all at once. I was left with the lodgers. One lodger was a sculptor in clay, his favourite subject crouching beasts, tigers in the main. His glaze of choice was an intense Middle Eastern turquoise. His hands and feet were interesting to me. He was a sweet man. I remember him clearly saying that at least the clay didn’t get under his nails. The nails of his feet and his hands had been pulled out under torture.

Unlike our lodger, my mother’s courtier was a fabulist. I would think this, wouldn’t I, but I feel it was less to my father that she was unfaithful than to the strictures of a certain Edinburgh that just couldn’t take her. If I look at this more closely, I’m aware that there was, together with the kenspeckle, right-and-proper city, a bohemian life stirring that she sensed but perhaps never quite managed to reach and that has since her death flowered orchidaceously.

It was not that my father did not love her. They were so unalike by extraction and temperament that it is evident, even to me, their child, that theirs was a real passion. It was just that he loved buildings too and the buildings of Scotland at that time were being blown up, knocked down, blasted, wrecked and swiped down by permission of the state in a way that called directly to my father’s dedicated curatorial heart. It was a love, and it was a love for life.

Several times, Mummy’s admirer turned up at our house dressed in costume. This wasn’t to fool me but to amuse her. I don’t think I crossed his mind. I seem to remember him turning up as Mr Toad once, but maybe that was a mufti-day. He certainly had a veteran open-topped vehicle of some sort, that necessitated the putting away inside our overcoats of my mother’s and my waist-length hair. Mummy had a circular thing like a fur hoop; it was called a ‘rat’. You pulled your hair through it and arranged a bun or a beehive or a twist or a chignon or a cottage loaf. You fixed the arrangement with long hairpins of the sort that come in handy in old black-and-white films, for lock-picking, car-starting, etc.

Just as she was an early user of the contraceptive pill, my mother was a pioneer hairdryer user. Like all her machines, it had a name and broke almost at once, to be half mended by her. One morning as we sat in my nursery, I on her knee, Morphy Richards sucked instead of blew and we spent a morning disentangling, you could almost say lock-picking, our long hair, hers pale blonde and mine more brown, from this space-age machine, with its cunning design suggestive of weaponry and air travel.

My mother followed with complete involvement the lives of many of the animals who lived at Edinburgh Zoo. We wept together when the elephant seal perished after choking on an ice lolly stick someone had given him. Why had they not given him a cornet? We observed the high-held pregnancy of Susu the giraffe. My mother tried to correct me for mourning the zoo’s elephant, Sally, more than my great-aunt Beatrice, known as Beadle. The defining triumph of my mother’s animally attached life was when, unanswerably, the zoo’s golden eagle, William, laid an egg. We both of us feared the salamander and the electric eel, looking at their flaccid yet potent inertia in absorbed disgust. My mother was warned off by zookeepers for hanging around the penguins and the ring-tailed lemurs. The keepers were right. She wanted to bring the creatures home with us. After she died, I was turfed out of the zoo for trying to catch a chipmunk. Actually, I wanted a pygmy hippo.

When you fly up to Edinburgh, if you look under the left oxter of the plane as it commences its descent into the airport, you will see what remains of my parents’ idyll. Its name was Craigiehall Temple and we went there on summer weekends towards the end of my mother’s life. It stands above the banks of the River Almond, a folly three storeys high growing among the wild white raspberries and enclosing beeches. Its stairs wound through its three octagonal rooms, the top one with a golden ceiling around whose cornice ran plaster ribbons held by plaster doves. It had a doll’s house portico and no amenities at all. My parents furnished it from street sales and Mrs V’s. The piano in the top room cost half a crown, of which there were eight in the pound. There was a large cane chair that extended and had a pocket for magazines and a place where you could put your sundowner. My father called this chair ‘the British Fascist’. The middle room was where we all slept on camp beds that rolled away in the day. I lay on mine in my sleeping bag pretending hour upon hour to be a caterpillar, then a chrysalis. I was usually asleep by the time I was due to break open as something more glamorous and winged. There was a chemical lavatory and at night, with much care, as though handling moths, my parents lit the gas mantles of hurricane and Tilley lamps. The smell of paraffin makes me feel sick, as do all petrol compounds including Cow Gum, which we used to stick down layouts at Vogue; but to the paraffin-nausea there is also a dizzy homesickness for me since it was the source of much of our heat and light when I was a child.