I kept trying to make things better for people and failing. I had the powerful sense that I was being a nuisance. It seemed that I could not make things clear to anybody.

I am absolutely certain that none of this is unusual when you find yourself in hospital. When it comes to hospital Omne ignotum pro terrore says it all. Why was I so sure I was going to die? Was I attention-seeking? At first I feared I might be. I determined to be as mouselike as I could. It is a thing I do, a McWilliamish habit. We go humble and invisible. It drives Fram mad. I see why. But it’s what fear brings out in me.

I didn’t think precisely that Death would pass me over on his ward calls if I were polite and self-effacing enough. I thought that the nurses wouldn’t resent me. It was as pathetic as that. And why should nurses resent their patients? Why are they nurses if they do that? I don’t know, but these ones, or so I thought, did. I have reason now to think that I wasn’t wrong, but let that come later.

It was a high-dependency ward, intensive care. The standard of care was considerable given the intensity of demand. Cleanliness was rigorously observed. My older son came in, his beauty like a bonfire. He loved washing his hands with the antibacterial gel at the end of the bed. It made him smile the naughty smile that I had forgotten till my children restarted it: it was my mother’s. His green eyes went slanty and flashed jokes to me. I loved looking at him.

I loved looking at him.

In that ward, after that fit, for some days, I could see. It was as though lightning had struck with the fit and released me from the dark wooden trunk that had grown round me, blinding and stiffening me. I was shocked back to seeing for a bit.

It was lucky that I could see at the start as there is no point being unable to in an intensive care ward; there is such a lot to fall over, much of it affixed to or into people.

It was a mixed ward. It was arranged around death, of course, but more explicitly than usual in wards that are less acute. Beds did come free while I was there, if I can put it like that. Curtains and pulleys were used with seamanlike efficiency and speed. Two of us could not die in spite of efforts in that direction. Each was fighting according, I suppose, to their habit. To my right lay an elderly physician called Michael. He was very ill, handsome still, and over eighty-five. He asked for very little though one time in the night he asked for something for the pain. It did not come for a long time. He had been a consultant. He did not once use swagger or bullying or any of the tricks we saw daily put to good use by the young, fit, consultants on their ward rounds.

Why cannot doctors be kinder to doctors? What is it that makes them forget that to know what is happening to you is not to be relieved of pain or of fear? Michael had a younger wife and a son who was still in the sixth form at his Central London school. Not long ago he must have known the comforts of love, the warmth of talk.

Necessarily, the visiting hours were strict. He saw his wife most evenings for a short while. She was attractive, blonde, cool, American; an academic or even a doctor? They had no privacy. He was dying. She was losing her husband, her son’s father. You do not marry a man far older than yourself without thinking of these things.

Nor do you marry a much older man unless you want the support of his seniority. Even sick to death, he was not reduced. Unlike many strong personalities close to death, he had not become pure will. He declared no faith and spoke little. We had one stilted conversation about schools for boys in London, which was how I learned about his son. We were sleeping not four feet apart.

I spent some of the nights planning a short story set in a ward like this. I was inspected by a serious, gentle Middle-European neurologist from time to time. A charismatic professor swooped sexily through but hardly stopped at me. The comely trainee doctors might have been his due. A hierarchy of desire was evident in the doctoring and nursing staff. After certain visits, the air was left with that sense that a personage has passed, a star shed its starry dust.

We lay in our beds beyond desire.

The other person who was dying was taking it another way, not with Michael’s enduring silentness. She was opposite me and I feared her and feared for her. She was afraid of her own bowels with which she was locked in mortal wrangle. She wanted to catch them before they betrayed her. I had now seen this in two people I loved as they died, my grandmother and my friend Rosa, another uncomforted doctor.

Vi was dying like a little child unjustly shut in a cupboard. She howled to be let out. The cupboard wasn’t her dying, it was her own body. Every few minutes she howled out, ‘It’s me bahls.’ She was as afraid of her shit as of her end.

She called for a nurse at regular intervals all night in the slack light of the dimmed ward. A disdainful call would come over to her from the nursing station. I didn’t realise it yet, but almost every high dependency ward has a lady like Vi, an old-fashioned old woman become a stranded little girl again, howling across to the other shore. It’s the reaction to such women that varies, I was to learn later. But Vi was a nuisance and a bore and because she was reduced to an animal there was no chance for her to change; or that’s how she was dealt with on that ward.

I mentioned her to Fram and he told me just to think about something else, to tune it out. He had misunderstood me. It wasn’t that I was upset by her, I was upset for her. That made him crosser. Why did I have these fantasies of helpfulness when I myself was quite clearly helpless?

I did indeed mismanage that visit to hospital. I don’t know quite how I got it so wrong, but I did. I was full of fear continually. I wasn’t too afraid of dying because I almost thought that I had. From time to time I was put on a trolley or into a chair and taken for tests.

These were various and not uninteresting. Some I had been subject to before during the early days of hunting down my blepharospasm. Electrodes were glued into my long hair as close to the scalp as they could go. My brain answered various questions. My body got heavier and heavier. It became like a stone upon my spirit. I’ve always been prone to treat my body like a stranger into whom I’m surprised to have bumped. During this stay in hospital it became a bit like an uninvited guest.

In the window of my workroom here on Colonsay, my small travelling radio, which I had turned off earlier because the rain was making its sound crunchy, has burst spontaneously into pure uncompromised sound. It is — I know it at once — the Adagio of Brahms’s Violin Concerto. The tune goes sinuously and excruciatingly lovingly to its quiet end.

It’s the first outing of a new recording by Valery Gergiev, so new, says, the radio, that it’s ‘still quivering’.

The Brahms Violin Concerto is for me a Colonsay piece of music. When we were almost still children, and the youngest children were properly small, we listened to it on Sunday mornings in summer. Electricity was trembly and contingent and the recording was on a long-playing record, played on a gramophone of home-made construction. To me, then, it was music of potential, of how my life would be, and of the present, new, familial, romance, the children, the parents, the smell of cooking meat, Papa sipping Madeira from a silver cup, so the drink smelt of damsons and tarnish, quite often a fire in spite of the bright summer light, the fire deep in the grate, its flames pale pink and blue, and a scent of spicy rose petals, never in this soft air completely crisp, in a thin deep bowl from China, and of rich dampness from unstopping rain that washed and washed the sky so that you could not believe its whiteness when eventually the rain was drawn aside. The books in Colonsay House hold water, sweet water unlike that salt library in the West Indies when I was twenty-one and could see though was blind to so much.