It felt not unlike the aftermath of drinking till blackout and indeed Fram, who saw me in hospital, at first wondered if I had been. For me the consequence of taking one drink is that I cannot stop for ever longer and more deeply degrading periods afterwards. If only it had been that simple. I do not know why my brain took this great insult and gave me a fit. I know that I was saved from something worse by my god-daughter, who was with me, and who rang an ambulance because she was afraid for both of us. She told me later, doing an imitation, that I hid from the ambulance men, and questioned their choice of shoes for hospital. I can remember nothing, just as after a blackout.
It was in A & E that I came to. I felt as though I was in the middle of a painting of a deathbed. I lay on a foreshortened bed off which I hung in a curtained space, with, to one side, a slim young man with striped hair in a stream like Beethoven running, and at the foot a group of young people in summery motley, cotton, stripes, lace, shawls, hoods. Two of them were blond and one had the dark hair and eyes of a young knight in a painting from the Renaissance. I remember thinking all that, the Beethoven, the clothes, the similarity to a painting, and I thought at that same moment that if I had had a stroke I was still myself within. I was frightened. I was worried that I had disrupted a number of people’s days. I was embarrassed. I wondered how I could ever make it up to the children. There was also the startling fact that I could see.
I knew that I could not simply be polite and get out of this one. Something had occurred and the event, whatever it was, would not go away. I could not pretend that it had not happened. I was unable to remember that morning save for two detailed things. My first visitor that Sunday morning had been my daughter’s friend Edward Behrens, later to be the Italian Renaissance figure at the foot of the bed in A & E. We had discussed the mushrooming scene in Anna Karenina, the moment when Tolstoy says that you could almost hear the grass growing, and describes a blade of grass that has pierced its way through a grey-green leaf of, I think, aspen. I said that I wanted to learn Russian and we discussed audio systems of teaching oneself a language. I suspected that I would be too passive to compensate for the absence of a teacher. Something was wrong that morning and I sent Behr on his way. It was a sunny day in Chelsea. He was off to lunch with friends. I felt as though the inside of my body were heating up and going to split my skin. I was afraid that I might be sick or worse in front of this clean young man who has been so good to me over these blind years.
The next thing I remember is that my god-daughter Flora appeared in the dark of the hall at that flat. Its lighting was faint, its mood brown. The hall featured several subfusc contemporary oil paintings of Italian street scenes and a large bronze sculpture of a multiple demonic head that cast a horned shadow. When Flora arrived, over six foot two and thin as grasses in wind, she stood in the light of the front door and I saw her in the kind of intense detail that came to me often when I was very drunk and that was one of the reasons why I continued to explain my drinking to myself — that crack of clear high vision before passing out. It felt a bit like some kind of love, or doting.
I saw Flora heightened, as even more porelessly exquisite than her genes and mien have made her. She might have been the last thing I ever saw. For all she knew, she was. I scared her terribly. My last mortal sight before the new, fitting, world was a young woman of disproportionate height and slenderness in the lace and pinny of a Victorian child, complete with bloomers and smock. Below this stretched her long white legs, ending with ballet pumps. Her chiselled pale blonde head is perhaps a ninth of the length of the rest of her. Her hands waved like white cloth under water. She looks at the world through specs. God knows what she saw.
And then, for me, nothing. For poor Flora, panic and telephone calls, chasing to ground diverse family members, keys, messages, toothbrush, the intimate chores of sudden event. We get no rehearsal. She did it all with the kind of competence that can come only naturally.
I knew that something had happened and was possessed by the idea that it was a stroke. McWilliams die young of strokes, especially fat McWilliams. Thin ones die young of heart attack.
In the hospital Flora said, ‘Fram and Minoo are coming. Fram says everything will be all right.’ Fram is the human whom I always believe. I hand to him inappropriately profound knowledge and sagacity, authority. It is burdensome for any mortal and worse for one as sceptical and intelligent. Nonetheless, all I wanted was Fram’s assurance and he will have known that. The same goes for our son Minoo.
Beethoven said, ‘You are in the best place, Candia. We do not think it is a stroke. As far as we can see, you seem to have had a grand mal fit.’
He knew what to say. He saw the main fear, addressed and dismissed it, and supplied as much fact as he was able. He also, with some generosity, said something sensible and kind about the ever higher doses of antipsychotic drugs I had been prescribed with a view to causing my brain to have some sort of benevolent convulsion that might, as had sometimes been suggested by certain controlled cases and had been written about in a couple of academic papers, alleviate my blepharospasm. What Beethoven said was mild, intelligent and noncommittal.
By now I realised Beethoven was in fact my GP and he knew me well enough to tell me the truth. It was a relief to be understood, to be treated as myself. He spoke sanely and the relief, that of finding myself in a sane, if frightening, world, was great. It is Beethoven, of all the first wave of doctors, who has helped the most. How frustrating then that his skills — common sense, empathy, compassion, practical doctoring — are undervalued in an NHS crippled by bureaucratic failure to communicate from the most basic to the most elevated levels and awash with specialisms that take no account of one another.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said my GP. ‘You must go to Don Carlos.’
I heard it with gratitude as a sentence from the lost world, from which I had been cut off by a mixture of illness and my own self-isolation. Long before I had become ill, I had become almost incapable of going out. But this was a healthy sentence and I heard it gratefully. I also realised that very few people knew how odd and shy I now was and that the thought of going out at all was nearly impossible, that my automatic response to any invitation or suggestion was ‘No’. I wanted to be connected, but had forgotten the flags to hoist to make the right signals.
I love Don Carlos, the darkness of the bass voices, the problems of conscience and power, the fear that fills it, the intractable love-muddle. All the stuff that my father disliked about it, I love. It makes me feel that nothing cannot be thought through to the sound of it, though actually my father might have said one is feeling rather than thinking. It thickens the air and my father liked his mental air clear although he could do turbid domestic silences and was a retired master of brooding absence. He did these for my mother, not my stepmother, who was certainly a better wife for him. I wonder how often in a day I think, in three contexts, that last phrase? So much so that the ease with which I use it to hurt myself bears reining in. Since my husbands’ wives are not there to hurt me, why do I sink to using the thought of them to do so?
Because, perhaps, it feels familiar.
The days that followed in hospital I still cannot make out. I felt like an animal and I knew that I was dying. I could not explain this to people. I was acutely worried about my daughter, who was already in a bad way as her ex-boyfriend had recently died in his early twenties of anoxia. When I got to a ward, my diagnosis was posted on my bed. It said that I had anoxia. Clem was wobbly and I couldn’t properly help. I was rigged up to tubes and looked unconvincing as a comforter. In American English a comforter is what we in Britain call an eiderdown or quilt or in Scotland it’s a downy. In the Prayer Book, the Comforter is the Holy Ghost. I looked more like an eiderdown.