Perhaps it was a consolation. Given my parents’ milieu it may even have been a consolation that had been dreamed up. For which I thank any of them who survive, who may read this. I know I enjoyed it though Queen Alcestis herself was too short to convince in her part as my mother.
Art did some of its work then. I thought of this theatre outing with shame when my younger son and I went to Britten’s Rape of Lucretia together. Better at seeing into life at twelve than I at any age, he sat holding my hand in the airy Maltings at Snape in Suffolk. We were there in the company of Mark Fisher. It does not do to think that we will not pass on to those we love pain that we have ourselves sustained. So many kinds of blindness are involved in love that can in its turn bedizen us with sugared illusions.
We watched Tarquin sucking up to Lucretia, making his case in frontal fashion, warrior without and weasel not far within, and we watched her piteous shame. My father’s deep attachment to the work of Britten and his taste for the composer’s summoning of pity and fear without grandiosity has come straight down to me and Minoo.
It was as much the fault of the woman’s vanity, the music made it plain. Yet Minoo never let my hand go. He is a realist and a natural writer who saw it all before I did, and waited, a seasoned reader of Greek, accents and all, for the consequences of the actions and inactions that might have made his life unrecognisable to him, had he not decided that, being life, it was to be royally respected and stuffed with jokes. And taken at an angle when it was sore.
It is my lunch hour in my nursery-study on the Isle of Colonsay. The reason why I cannot hear an axe is that William is in church for the funeral. I decided that I should not go because although I knew the dead man I look so odd at the moment that I might be a distraction. Then I wondered if that was not vain. Where is the proper place to be? In church, I suspect, now the funeral is under way. What does it matter that I bore myself explaining why my face is screwed up and I am twice the size I was as a girl? No one is looking and probably the ideal place to be to avoid explanation is here, where all is known anyway. You don’t keep a secret long on an island with 120 souls.
I allow myself to listen to the radio during my lunch hour. I switched it on and there came the sigh and rush sound of an amplified seashell. ‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘that’s interference. The reception is bad here.’
It wasn’t. It was applause. A different kind of reception. It can be hard to tell what’s what in the world of sounds as well as in the world of seeing.
I had a short blast of sight earlier and looked out on the pair of tall cedars I seem always to have known. There are in fact three of them.
After my time in hospital that was in order to observe and catch me should I have another fit, I was allowed home. None of us knew what had happened. During the preceding two years, several highly qualified neurologists and neurosurgeons had taken a squint at my brain and its nervous system. A neuropsychiatrist of penetrating if iterative intelligence had reminded me weekly in a slow crisp intelligent manner of the inception and progress of my complaint, at the price of a…I can’t actually think of anything that costs as much as private medicine at those reaches of obscurity. And there was no one in the National Health, apparently, who could address my brain’s particular problem of function after the failure of botulinum toxin injections.
I have thought of a measure of cost. During my years of reclusion and then of blindness, I reverted to stereotype. Female novelists are caricatured as troubled, often overweight beings accompanied by at least one cat. As readers may remember, I had two, by the time of the fit, a Blue Russian cat called Rita and a creamy soft British cat with lilac edges and a butch glare, whose name was Ormiston, a name given to male McWilliams for hundreds of years.
If you don’t like cats, skip this paragraph. Rita came to us when our first Russian cat Sigismond was run over. She is his sister. Her first owners had not been able to care for her and her second owners became allergic. She is nervy, possessive, controlling, man-mad and clever, a bossy animal devoted to Parmesan and small warm places. Her eyes are green with a turquoise depth and she has the incomparable limbs and head of a Russian. Her middle is soft. Ormiston’s breed is meant neither to be fluffy nor intelligent. In both regards he failed, if it is a failure to be fluffy and clever. He showed from a kitten, when he was the size of a meringue with whipped cream, preposterous bravery, devotion, ball skills and single-mindedness. Prawns and human love have been his areas of study. Between the cats lay the vexed questions of all shared private lives, power and influence. Our family divided just about fairly around the cats, my older son keeping a good balance by liking neither. These animals, who comforted my nights and conversed with me through the days, who knew my goings out and my comings in, who petted me and fed my need for contact, who were the differences between the often sluggish days, cost £350 each. It is a great deal of money, but one visit to the doctor who recapitulated to me each week my illness’s symptoms and progress was two cats per hour or every part thereof.
Not one cat, or part of a cat for a part of an hour, two full cats.
Not that sight isn’t priceless, but I was being prescribed drugs. These drugs came to about two cats a month. I saw, or attended, in addition, during that time, at least two other doctors per week, at a combined cost of two cats. The cats added up.
By the time of my fit, I was ingesting multiple high doses of venlafaxine, mirtazapine, levetiracetam, and had been through exceedingly high doses of citalopram and lamotrigine. Zopiclone had wended its powerfully stupefying way among them like a thug whom you fancy. I’d abandoned beta-blockers because they scared me. I preferred the panic they were meant to stop to the nasty medicinal panic they created.
The drugs bothered the children. A number of these drugs are powerful antidepressants. When first I was blind, no one suggested that I was depressed. I was not happy, but my circumstances had been peculiar for years, and now I seemed to have gone blind. Happi ness of any marked sort at such a time might have been surprising. After I was first put on these drugs, with the primary purpose always being that they might in sufficient doses cause my brain to release my closed eyes, it was opined that I was indeed by now depressed. I was still sad, maybe sadder, but all my own observation of depressed people, and I have had a good deal of it, told me that I wasn’t depressed as they had been. I was, since becoming sober, never unable to create a pretext to enter the day. I could spur myself yet.
However, the insistence was by then that, having taken so many antidepressants, I was depressed. I was taking sufficient antidepressants to cheer up a cow by the time I fell down thwack in a grand mal fit in that shaded summer last year, just after speaking my first book for more than ten years.
After the fit, the children arranged a rota. They, or their friends, babysat me for a time, day and night. The cats and I loved it, when we were conscious. I couldn’t any longer recognise myself, even from within.
I’d grown used to my swollen and unfamiliar body, but now my mind was loosening and, it seemed, hardening too. I was returned to the same thoughts with a repetitiveness that grew tighter and tighter. I couldn’t challenge my own poisonous logic as ably as I once had. I had aged suddenly, become a dead weight on those I cared for, a bore, ugly, terrified and alone; and I deserved it.
Perhaps the antidepressants had at last, as one doctor hazarded, summoned their customary foe. During these sweaty nights I longed for the unabridged In Search of Lost Time but listened over twenty-five times to the Naxos abridged version, read by Neville Jason. I have now, by May 2009, heard it thirty-seven times. At the end of the last uninterrupted run, I turned to War and Peace, unabridged this time. It too is read by Neville Jason. Not one of the voices he does for each character in either book is the same as any other. I cannot sufficiently thank this stupendous actor and enthusiast. I hope he already has the Légion d’honneur. By abandoning myself one at a time to the sentences of Proust, albeit translated, I saw off zopiclone, even if I did not see off nightmares. The cats came and went happily in the garden of the borrowed flat. Rita lay on the hot terrace under the olive tree and Ormy fuzzed around under the spilling hostas and catmint playing ping-pong with bumblebees. From time to time he tried to kiss Rita, holding her precise head in his feathery paws, but she cuffed him. Early in the mornings, between five and five-thirty, he would come to me. The drugs made me sweat heavily. Sometimes it was tears, sometimes it was sweat, but my cat Ormiston made as though to pat my face dry with his front paws. He held his claws quite in, and laid his pads on my eyes.