mother wouldn’t talk about Isabel’s father. ‘He did what he wanted,’ was the most she ever said, ‘the way all men do.’
Isabel thought he must have been strong, to have farmed so many acres on his own, and powerful, to rule over it. She thought he must have been one of the natural lords of that land: tall, lean, bronzed, mean, with features sharpened by the hot wind: packs of dogs and horses and lesser men scurrying at their heels. The lesser men were red from Foster’s and rendered stupid, if they hadn’t been to begin with, by the coarseness and ignorance in which they traded. If there was a flower, they trod it underfoot, and laughed. If there was a dog, they kicked it. That was why the dogs snarled and snapped.
She could not see her mother with that kind of man. Her mother saw visions, too, Isabel was sure of it. Her mother saw something of the infinite in the yellow dust, or in the rusty clouds swirling over the flat land, that sometimes illuminated her face and made her sigh with pleasure.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Isabel the little girl. ‘Is there something out there?’
‘Something more than I can tell,’ said Isabel’s mother, averting her eyes from the horizon, scraping away at burnt, thin-bottomed saucepans.
Isabel tore a leg off her favourite doll, smeared it with mutton fat, and gave it to the dogs to chew.
Isabel told me so. She never confessed it to anyone else; not Homer her husband, and certainly not Jason her son. I am blind and can be trusted not to condemn.
Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Jennifer has made tea. Hilary offers me a plate of biscuits.
‘Chocolate chip a.m.: lemon sandwiches p.m.,’ she says, describing the plate to me.
I take the chocolate chip from nine o’clock. Lemon sandwiches flake all over the carpets, and though the blind can vacuum clean it is not a very efficient process. Hope brought them with her. She should have known better.
I have been blind for two years. I crossed a road without looking. A car hit me behind the knees. I bounced on to its bonnet and off again, cracking my head on the kerb, somewhere to the left of the medulla; in the area which controls the sight. The blow did unspecified damage which means my eyes simply fail to register what they see. The fact intrigues surgeons and eye specialists and indeed psychiatrists, and I am forever up at the hospital while they peer and probe and inject and intrude. They did an operation which left the left side of my right hand insensitive to hot and cold, but achieved nothing except my pain and terror and humiliation. Occasionally some irritable physician will remark, ‘I am sure you could see if you wanted to.’
There are ranks in blindness, of course, like anything else. I, being slightly mysterious in my plight, almost wilful, and my eyes looking pretty much like anyone else’s, come high up on the scale. A noble blindness. To have been born blind, or to have gone blind through illness, ranks lower. A pitiful, punitive blindness. The sense that God afflicts us at our birth because we deserve it is strong. The millions of India live by the notion, after all.
An accident, however! Accidents happen to everyone. They are dramatic and exciting; children love them, and the wearing of the plaster that signifies calamity. I ran into the street because I had had a quarrel with my husband Laurence, and I didn’t see the car coming because I was crying, or perhaps because I didn’t want to.
Listen to the rain against the window! Summer rain. Each drop is a lost human soul, driven by winds it cannot comprehend, trying to get in here where it is safe and warm, where we gather our infirmities together and make the most of what we have. Be grateful for the glass that saves you from the force of such savagery and discontent. Drape it with curtains; polish it on fine days; try not to see too much, but just enough for survival’s sake. Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, or waste too much energy on other people’s woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.
These things Isabel taught me in spite of herself. Little by little, she revealed herself and her story to me. Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Draw the curtain.
On Jason’s sixth birthday Isabel woke with the feeling that something was wrong. She was launched suddenly into consciousness, one second lying in dreams, the next starting into alertness. She thought perhaps there was an intruder in the room, but of course there was not. Homer lay beside her as usual on the brass bed, on his side, relaxed and peaceful, legitimate and uxorious, the delicate skin of his eyelids stretched fine over his mildly prominent eyes. His face had the vulnerable, slightly raw look that faces do, which go bespectacled by day and naked by night.
He slept quietly. He always did. A man with a clear conscience, thought Isabel. Not weltering and hiding deep down somewhere beneath the levels of consciousness – but neatly and tidily, just below the surface, afraid of nothing because he had done no wrong. If Homer slept, what could be amiss?
Something. Jason? No. If she listened hard, as now she did, she could hear the rhythmic change in the stillness which meant that Jason too slept soundly in the room above.
Nothing unusual was happening outside in Wincaster Row. It was half-past six, too early for the milkman, the paperboy or the postman: those ritual early callers who come like the sun, to remind each household that it is not alone but owes a living, perforce, to the rest, and must soon get up and make it. Well, time enough.
The fright that woke Isabel did not diminish with the discovery that there was no cause for it; rather it intensified into a profounder apprehension: the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.
Work? But what could happen there? She had so far presented four late-night programmes for the BBC: they had gone successfully; she had a new two-year contract; the work was comparatively easy. True, it involved the professionalisation of the self, every Monday night, the handing over of the persona for consumption by millions; but that came easily enough, and was forgotten by Tuesday afternoon. Even if her contract was cancelled, and she was ignominiously dismissed, she would not see that as disastrous but as a practical problem. This sudden new fear, now so powerful that it made her catch her breath and hug her chest, had nothing to do with practicalities.
Jason’s birthday? In the afternoon he was to have an outing to the cinema with five school friends. That, although nothing to look forward to, was surely nothing to fear. In fact Homer was to return early from the office and take them to the cinema, while she would stay home and ice the cake and cut little sandwiches into animal shapes. The division of labour was fair, and had been accomplished, as usual, without acrimony.
‘It’s true I’ll get to see the film,’ said Homer, ‘and you won’t. But watching Superman II with five six-year-olds is a dubious pleasure. You’re sure you don’t want to do it the other way round?’
‘No,’ said Isabel. ‘Besides, you’d make the sandwiches with brown bread in spite of it being Jason’s birthday.’
‘Jason’s digestion doesn’t know it’s his birthday,’ said Homer.
Nothing there, surely, to have her sitting up in alarm in her lacy white bed, in the safety of the dark, green-papered walls, the gilt mirrors on the walls throwing back images only of what was familiar and loved.
Isabel got out of bed and went upstairs to Jason’s bedroom. She, who once slept in the nude, now slept in a nightie – as do the mothers
