As if by telepathy, my landlord, who had accompanied his mother, asked, ‘Have you read Christopher Logue’s Homer?’

‘I love it. All Day Permanent Red,’ I replied. The luxury, for even two sentences, of an exchange about reading, after these dry months, was delicious.

It became plain to me only two days ago that we are in the season of sweet peas and peonies. One of my doctors lives within creeping distance and I feel a sense of achievement if I can get there and back without falling over or crashing into someone. Chelsea Week, I thought to myself, with plenty of nice country people up in town, would be a good time to make this stab at normality. It began as a treat. The King’s Road was the usual troubling sequence of negotiations and feints. Then there’s the big island to be gained in Sloane Square. Once in Sloane Street, I was sure I’d start to smell floral displays set out by the shops to attract the pollen-gatherers up for the Flower Show. I passed two neoclassical tubs of sweet flowery spikes, missed a lady who I could tell was very smart from her heels and her smell and from her polite, ‘I’m so sorry’, wobbled on for a bit more and bashed into someone around my height, gender female, coat weatherproof, accent cut-glass, shock utter, who shouted, ‘You fucking bitch.’

Perhaps she had just come from the doctor where she had heard bad news, or maybe the parking had been impossible or the train up from the country running late. Who is to say that none of us might not have said it?

There are some doctors who are in themselves curative. They lower your anxiety and your pulse as they speak; you sense their truth. This doctor is one such and I left his surgery capable even of seeing my way down the front steps. I walked home remade to a degree by this insightful man. It was only in my own street that I noticed my skirt had fallen down and that I was shuffling along inside a puddle of grey jersey that it had made around my shoes. The white stick was handy at pulling it up and re-establishing it. Another benefit of not seeing is that I didn’t see if anyone saw.

I am for the moment perching in this flat like a gull on a cliff. The metaphor isn’t overstretched. I am a bit of a gull, being blind, and gullible at the best of times. The flat might certainly in one way be likened to a cliff, for it is enormously tall. My friend and landlord has tucked me in under his wing in what was once one of the Tite Street studios of John Singer Sargent. Liv and I work in his studio, whose windows face north and south, twenty feet of sheer light, with muslin soothing or baffling the light over the street-side window.

It is not possible to be in this room and not feel better. It is exhilarating and it feels full of the ghosts of work. At present, it is not decorated, save accidentally and provisionally. Dressed or undressed, done-up or bare-boned, it is a room that in itself provides breath. I don’t believe in inspiration of the kind you wait around for, but this room has breathed some life back into me.

Sometimes in the night, between about 4 and 5 a.m., I can see a bit to read. I took down a book by Michael Levey called The Soul of the Eye. It’s an anthology about painters and painting; mostly it consists of painters themselves talking about painting and drawing.

I fell on two things, and now it is the day it is very painful, literally, to read them, but here they are, first Sargent himself in a letter of 1901: ‘The conventionalities of portrait painting are only tolerable in one who is a good painter—if he is only a good portrait painter he is nobody. Try to become a painter first and then apply your knowledge to a special branch — but do not begin by learning what is required for a special branch or you will become a mannerist.’

In the pale gap of reading time that I was granted I came too upon this, from On Modern Art by Paul Klee (1924): ‘Had I wished to present the man “as he is”, then I should have had to use such bewildering confusion of line that pure elementary representation would have been out of the question. The result would have been vagueness beyond recognition.’

This last refusal of distraction is entirely true to the line my father in his life took and the lines he made and the lines he drew.

Looking, now, at the high window and the plain grey of the walls, though I see very little clearly, I do see a composition that is timeless: a young woman of lovely form at work at a table on which rest some vessels and a jar of flowers. If I scowl and make horrible faces, I can see what I already know, that the young woman is Liv, that the vessels are mugs, glasses and bottles of scent and that the flowers are what must be gathered in their season and cut and cut again, sweet peas.

All that is required is a frame, and it is that which I’m attempting to construct with these words. By opening my mouth very wide, as though I’m screaming, but without sound, I can open my eyes in sympathy and read from The Soul of the Eye what it is that Poussin has to say about framing his picture The Israelites Gathering Manna:

I beg of you, if you like it, to provide it with a small frame; it needs one so that, in considering it in all its parts, the eyesight may remain concentrated, and not distracted beyond the limits of the picture by receiving impressions of objects which, seen pell-mell with the painted objects, confuse the light.

It would be very suitable if the said frame were gilded quite simply with dull gold, as it blends very softly with the colours without disturbing them.

It is very difficult indeed to prevent the memory from confusing the light; as for the frame, I am attempting to gild it not at all save where it is of its nature golden.

Fram says that he never reads the childhood part of any biography, since childhoods bore him. He also used to say to me that one of my benefits as a wife was that I had no family, which is, strictly, very nearly true.

But I did have and do have the long, and for the most part by definition insular, since it took place and takes place on an island, family romance with the six Howard children and their parents, their stepmother, their beastly dogs, their fantastically frightful paternal grandmother, who on first sighting me enquired, ‘Who is the common girl in the corner?’ and who ended up by making revolting but much-loved bargello cushions for my first wedding present, embroidered with the coat of arms of my husband, and to whose wheelchair we tied fifty pink and fifty white balloons on the christening of my first son, so that the tiny fierce termagant was lifted up in her chair to the summer sky. She once again became, as she must have been in a hundred ballrooms when she was Di Loder, one of the identical Loder twins Diana and Victoria, who were on nonspeakers for half a century, a red-haired beauty afloat in white and pink, the cynosure of all eyes.

In order to make the crossing to the island of Colonsay it is necessary to end this chapter here.

LENS II: Chapter 4

Liv, who is twenty-two, has just asked me, at the start of our working day together, whether it would be better to be stone-blind than to be in this flickering and changeable state. As it happens, I have been up working for several hours and am therefore very close to stone-blind, but still it is inflected and there are colours within my eyelids. I seem to remember from accounts written by ‘properly’ blind authors like Ved Mehta and Stephen Kuusisto, that ‘real’ blindness can also be continually modifying within its veils and infinite shadings of black, or, more often, white. Of course, it depends on the kind of blind you are.

Liv’s question is an intelligent one. Perhaps it is the question; I’m certainly honoured she asked it, since it demonstrates a levelness of attitude to her employer and the peculiar situation she finds herself in with that employer, who is me. She made the point that her mother is averse to change, but that she, Liv, were she to be visited, heaven forbid, by such an affliction, would attempt to extract from it all the good that could be.