In its own time, the basking shark surfaced, voluminous, dark, impossible to read, never seen entire until finished, forming and pressing aside the waters from its back, as slow as the last word, holding time up; as the small fry before it had splintered time into fraught literal quickness.
Our own amateur dipping into that sea for a few fish to clean and split, to dip in oatmeal and place in butter in a pan, was shown up as the interruption we humans are to what is actually always going on.
After that easier time in February of this year staying with Fram and Claudia in Oxford, I understood that habituation was what I must use to drive out habit, and that, were I to be confronted with the reality of their life together, I would not be able to cleave so dearly to some trapping notion of their life’s perfected surface. Not that their life is any less happy than I imagine it, but instead of being as far from it as I can arrange to be and thinking of nothing but it, I can try although I am blind, to see it in truth.
It is not so dreadful not to be loved as it is not to feel able to give love: ‘Let the more loving one be me.’ It was the thing I could do, and somehow I have so scared myself as to feel that even the love I give, that came so easily, to my children, has been chilled by my shutting myself out in the cold.
I’m running out of things to lose and therefore find myself, to my shame, with rather less to give. It happened more suddenly than I had reckoned with. I think that it must be like that for everybody. It’s always too soon.
The weekend after I had spent quite a time in Oxford with them, Claudia invited me to stay again. Toby again cooked a roast with vegetables from his allotment and an aunt of Claudia’s was staying. Claudia has many aunts. There are many parts for women in her family drama.
The oven hadn’t been cleaned for a bit, so there was a smell of cooking. Fram is exigent about smells; they lighten or darken his mood. He was once angry when I made popcorn before Steven Runciman came to lunch at our flat in Oxford. The great student of the patriarchate of Constantinople was then in his late nineties. The air in the flat where we lived was blue with popped kernels and burnt corn oil, a seedy sort of hecatomb. Why did popcorn suggest itself as an appropriate snack?
That Friday evening in Oxford decades later by now in our own lives, Fram was scratchy, though the supper was delicious. I wondered whether it was all a put-up job, Claudia being so considerate of my feelings that she arranged to rile Fram to show me that their relationship isn’t perfect. Or the two of them setting it up, with Toby, spreading carbonised fat on the innards of the stove. Or…these are the tergiversations of my obsession in all its banality.
The evening passed happily, robustly, confidentially. I didn’t cry that much in bed after we had said goodnight and I managed to do what I do so that I will not howl like a dog, which is to have Proust ready in CD form on the turntable of the CD machine I take with me and put on the pillow next to me if I’m in a double bed. I hold another pillow and lie and listen.
Sometimes I wake up in the night and remember that I am I and what has gone before and I burn. My eyes stare open at these times, but what’s the point? They aren’t open, like water to light, for reading. They look at the carnage and they sting from the carbon of the burnt-up days and hopes. I burn with remorse. Its name, Remorse, suggests it is a practice form of death, ‘mors’, though its root is not death but the bite that it holds on the spirit.
No professional associated with the so-called ‘psychological approach’ to my blepharospasm had taken seriously the idea of remorse by this point. Every one of them flinched from any term that implied moral judgement or any system beyond the pragmatic, what you might call, even, the self-centred. How swiftly self has replaced even the sense of social responsibility. There is a free-market psychiatric bias in the establishment.
Perhaps the most rapacious free marketeer so far has been the hypnotist, famous and by all accounts highly effective, whom I visited just once in the New Year of this year. Her secretary took my credit card number. The waiting room offered the usual macabre trailer for what is to come. As has become familiar to me, magazines are laid out with exaggerated care as though they were learned journals, and loose-leaf files of before-and-after shots of plastic surgery procedures are helpfully disposed on a side table near the artificial flowers, that are periodically refreshed with scented spray by outside contractors. In the winter months, there may be a replacement flower arrangement in carmine and spruce. At Christmas the tree will be equipped with shiny empty presents hanging from the plastic-needled boughs.
I entered the studio (too creative in arrangement to be called a consulting room) of the renowned hypnotist, and she addressed me, looking at my woven leather handbag that I’d bought from a hippie outlet online. She spoke one word, which will be familiar to fancy shoppers.
‘Bottega?’ (Bottega Veneta is a, very expensive, Italian fashion house.)
No, I said, my bag wasn’t from there.
She interrogated any of my clothes that were susceptible of such a nakedly undeserved upgrade, and, when I wouldn’t play, she laid me low on a long leather lounger with a sticky bolster for my head. There was an almost fresh towel over it.
She encouraged me to think of a beach, on which I was lying, maybe in company, ‘feeling great about myself’. I took a beach from my extensive collection, a good cold beach, with pebbles and reeking seaweed. I added litter. I am made itchy by the idea of the hot palm-fringed beaches of the brochures, so in a way I was selecting a more relaxing setting in which to become porous to her trickling syrup.
She told me that I was right under now and that men preferred blonde to grey hair, so I might think of getting my hair highlighted. I was there because I couldn’t see, not because I was looking for Mr Anyone at All. Her own hair, I could not help having noticed, was what advertisers believe all men adore to run their craggy yet strangely sensitive fingers through, teased, red, and full of product. She encouraged me, in a special swooping, supercaring voice that sometimes left her grammar in trouble, to find a secret place within myself where I was ‘very very calm’.
I’d rather have been reading a book.
When she started talking in a normal, coarse, ‘real life’ voice again, I sat up and hoped that I could disappear for good.
‘It says on your paperwork you are a writer,’ she began. ‘I’ve written a book. Would you mind casting an eye over it? It’s going to be called I’m Alright, so Fuck You.’
The extraordinary thing is that I didn’t say, ‘I came to you because I cannot see and it is driving me mad.’ I said, ‘Oh, how very interesting. Is it about self-esteem issues?’
‘You are very sympathetic, Candida,’ she said. ‘You could be in my line of work.’
So now I know. I could talk rubbish to desperate people and be paid for it.
I cancelled the next two sessions (you had to book in batches, such was the demand). The secretary explained in a soothing voice that they would have to keep my deposit for the missed sessions. A hundred per cent. It may indeed be my path on life’s winding yet rewarding journey to utilise my prodigious empathic powers to print money with the sad press of others’ credulity. The book, over which no eye of mine had been cast, emerged, and is a big seller. That’s most likely because I went nowhere near it. Unsympathetic magic.
The worst of the remorseful nights have been in hospital, where you are more alone for not being alone. You cannot weep. It would be cruel and selfish, among the sick and dying. And if you start to weep, you may start to howl, and call down the shape that is lying in wait for us all in the dark, coming back at the gallop (or jig, or silent tread) again. Always coming back for more.