What to Look for in Winter Page 2

  There is pleasure, and I really doubted that there would be, in relistening, just as there is delight in rereading. It is a very different pleasure, and one of which I might not have, in the purist old days, approved. I have always deprecated the habit of reading simply for plot, for the solving of the puzzle. It is the texture of the text, the touch of the writer’s thinking upon my own thought, the intimacy of interinanimation that I loved and that had accompanied me all my conscious life.

  I confess I haven’t had even one jolt of this quality of delight since becoming a listener, though there have been many moments when I clumsily tried to stop the machine there–just there–and catch the words again, in order to make, as I’m afraid I would have done before, a note in the margin, or on a bit of paper. I find these notes now next to my bed where I do most of my listening, but of course I can’t read them; it’s like darning a black sock trying to read my writing now. The sort of reading that I used to love, reading several books simultaneously, is not now possible. I used to do it when I felt a novel brewing, that time when the unconscious is bulging, sticky and collecting with a view to its unknown quarry; in those conditions the strangest books forged relationships with one another and something new would be born. Books, even alone in a room, have that quality; they breathe; they can even, somehow, parthenogenetically, reproduce.

  Somehow? I know perfectly well how in my case. I buy them. It’s silly and I buy fewer than I did when I read or when I had some idea that I could or would read them, but I buy them to have them handy by me, to have their breath in my air, their breathing mixing with my own. I miss them.

  Just how hard this is to express came home to me only yesterday when, after Liv’s first morning typing for me, a young friend of my daughter’s visited. He had told me last week that he was going to spend the bank holiday weekend, among other, ice-creamier things, reading Timon of Athens in order to ready himself to read A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker on Timon. Never would I have thought that the intensest pleasure of my fifty-third year would be brought by being read aloud to from this generous, precise, thrilling book. It is the most intimate experience of my year so far and that intimacy was with the text and the ideas within the text and the modesty, breadth and quiddity of an, alas now posthumous, scholarly voice.

  So far, in my experience, this hasn’t happened with talking books, but they are marvellous things nonetheless. I have the addict’s tooth-grinding shakes when I’m running out of talking books. I know that I can turn to Proust again, but I like to have a fresh stash hidden somewhere about the place. There are, for example, three box-fresh sets of CDs (Plutarch’s Lives, Aristotle and A Guide to Ancient Greek Philosophy) hidden in this room, and every room in the flat has a similar hoard. It is exactly like keeping vodka in your steam iron. Any alcoholic, set the task of finding my hidden tapes and CDs, ‘just for emergencies’, you understand, would be through with the hunt in five minutes, easy as finding a bottle in a gumboot.

  The medical term used for my type of blindness is ‘functional’. The topsy-turvy logic of this is that I function hardly at all and can do very little for myself. I carry a fold-up-able white stick when I leave the house, which is seldom, and then mainly to visit doctors. You buy these white sticks from a website set up by the RNIB where all sorts of gadgets may be found, including talking microwaves. I’ve been fighting off microwaves since first they began and people started saying things like, ‘You can reheat your nasty cold coffee.’ I really don’t want a chatty microwave, but of course I see the point.

  It is a new world and I’d best take it as the adventure it is, generously, as though it were a gift. It is in a way a new way of seeing, not to see.

  Here I must advert to, and then we can each forget, or absorb, the saturation of our language with metaphors to do with sight.

  One of the unlooked-for benefits of this functional blindness was that I simply gave up cooking as too extreme a sport; sadly, the new lot of drugs they are trying on me have made of the new, thinner, me the old, fatter, me.

  Functional blindness is not a pest merely for its possessors. The state and its bureaucracy don’t much like it either, and in the past eighteen months I have spent much time with well-meaning personages assessing such grey areas as my ‘toileting ability’.

  As things stand, I was advised by the state that I must apply for a Disability Living Allowance, since without this I cannot register as blind which I must do before I can be considered for a guide dog. This allowance has just skyrocketed 65 pence per week. But my short career as a benefits scrounger will, as far as I can see, be terminated at the next Budget, when, if New Labour are still in, I shall be reassessed and, putatively, retrained to do a job more suited to my capacity or rather, as they say, ‘ability’, meaning the opposite.

  Back to that word ‘functional’. Perhaps it is my Scottishness, but I can’t see a way of writing this book without wanting it to be of some use. The privilege, as I understood it, of being a novelist was to touch the imagination of others with one’s own and to establish a contact more real than many other forms of encounter. It was my task, I thought, to convey the truth of what it is to be alive, to feel, and to think, to catch both differentness and connection in narratives that shed light on the secret human heart. So, perhaps, this exercise that intimidates me, on account of its going so deeply against my grain, may touch your synapses with my own as I give some account of what it has been to have lived, to have felt and to have thought within my head before and since it closed down its main route to, and means of, interpreting the world, my eyes.

  I shall affix this spoken earpiece to the coming, first, dark lens of my account that follows. I wrote it before I knew how blind I was to become. After the central chapter named ‘Bridge’, the words are again spoken not written with that last stub of sight I had.

  But first a few compass bearings:

  I have three children each with a different last name.

  I have been married twice.

  In one sense I still am.

  My children have two fathers.

  My name is Candia. It is not Candida. When I meet people, they often say, ‘Don’t you mean Candida?’ not even, ‘Do you mean Candida?’ My nickname, which is complicated for reasons that will become clear, is Claude. My name is not Claudia. It is Candia. Greek, not Latin.

  I have called five people Mum, Mummy or Mama.

  The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 contributed much to the splitting of my second marriage.

  My second husband, Fram, lives with someone else.

  Her name is Claudia.

  Fram and Claudia live together with her twins, whom I love, and their father, Toby Buxton.

  I love my two husbands’ two partners.

  Among the words that make me most frustrated are ‘Candia McWilliam’s swallowed the dictionary’. I heard them first in the sandpit, where I had just said ‘avocado’. I was three. It strikes me now that the accuser must have done some pretty heavy swallowing too. The sneers recurred a lot in reviews of my stuff; what annoyed me was the implication that women had better stay within lexical limits.

  That said, I last heard these words, or their equivalent, only a few months ago in the mouth of a prodigiously educated Cognitive Behavioural Therapist at Guy’s Hospital. How ingenious of him at once to have found me out. I was, very nearly, angry.

  The following things are also true:

  I am six foot tall and afraid of small people.

  I am a Scot.

  I am an alcoholic.

  There is nothing wrong with my eyes.

  I am blind.

  I cannot lose my temper though I am being helped to, as you see above.

  I exude marriedness and I am alone.

  This book is, among very many other things, an attempt to find that temper in order that I may lose it, and in losing it, perhaps, find my lost eyes.

  LENS I: Chapter 1

  I have conducted my conscious life for as long as I can rememb
er by suppression, and so this is, or threatens to be, the sort of book which I am not temperamentally suited to write, an account of a life lived, not transmuted into fiction. For me the fiction had carried the deep truths behind which I had felt able to retire, and to carry on weaving it.

  Some writers, from Henry Green to Hilary Mantel, can manage this poetically veracious memoir-writing naturally. I read the best of them with pleasure and fascination. They illuminate without glare and delineate privacy without harming it. The memoirs I shrink from are accounts of profitable suffering; no, profitable accounts of suffering.

  I can’t imagine that this book will be profitable in a pecuniary sense. Yet I know that any suffering in my life–‘suffering’ may be too extreme, too official, too martial, above all too tragic a word for whatever has happened to me, though maybe not for what I have brought about–might be of some use to someone. I am porous to the pain of others, but just of late have got stuck. I am fogged up. Here’s why.

  It has been brewing since I was five, I know it now. I found that the way to distance oneself from discomfort was to trap it in not spoken but written words, and that, similarly, the way to hold fast to the good was to try–much less easy–to do the same. I was greatly helped in my project by being a fat child. I was good at sitting still because I wasn’t any good at moving. It was my good fortune to have two parents who never stopped making marks on paper and the richest part of whose lives were led in her imagination in one case and his intellect in the other. I copied them.

  Why start on this now? In 2006, anxious about money and aware that I was about to start out aged fifty on a life alone, in Oxford, a city in which I had taken twenty years not to feel at home, I accepted an invitation to become a judge of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. I was a sedulous, note-taking, reader of contemporary fiction as well as a lot of other stuff, and I thought I might as well harness my habit. I liked either the actuality of or the sound of the other judges. I wasn’t wrong to.

  The entire process of judging fiction is difficult to defend or articulate and painful even–especially?–for any ‘winner’ of tender conscience but, insofar as it is possible, we remained pure. Early on, the Chair of the judges’ committee had given me a fine piece of advice: ‘If you fall in love with one book you will be setting yourself up for heartbreak,’ she said. I took prophylactic measures, and fell in love with three or four.

  After the first judges’ meeting, which took place in the solid surroundings of the Athenaeum, I went to visit a friend with whom I had been at school after I was sent away from home in Scotland. We have known one another since we were twelve. ‘What is wrong with your face?’ she asked, and offered to balance teabags on my eyes, which did indeed feel wonky, despite the soothing light of a grey spring day in St James’s Square. My eyes juddered in their sockets as though they were coming loose and they were hot and couldn’t settle unless I told them to. So the implicit pact between intellect and eyes, eyes and reading heart, had to be declared and had already begun to involve willpower instead of consolation and ease.

  I had noticed that I was having difficulty holding the gaze of anyone who was talking to me, but had, characteristically, ascribed this to even more reading than usual and an unadmitted struggle with sleeping, especially through the hours between two and four in the morning, the time when suicide suggests itself and addicts give in.

  I kept on reading, of course. Twice, I visited GPs, who each prescribed eye drops. I was aware that I couldn’t deal as well with people as I had been used to, because I couldn’t hold their gaze. I wondered if this was a late-onset affectation, like a fake stammer to imply an engaging tentativeness. But I couldn’t employ my will over my eyes, couldn’t respond or beam or seek or console as I had always–I realised–been used to doing.

  My stint as secretary of one of the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings came to an end and I was relieved, as I had relied upon my intensity of gaze, my peripheral vision and my attunedness in order to intuit who needed to speak when and for how long.

  From my father I have inherited the characteristic that I am irresistible to panhandlers. University towns are rich in such people and I have all my life felt that I am one. There’s no gap to mind. Most of the beggars in Oxford know my name, or a version of it. My chief heckling bridesmaid at the time was a rather cross, sometimes violent, highly intelligent alcoholic, named Man. By the cashpoint one day he said, ‘Ere, Candice, what is wrong with your eyes?’

  I visited an ophthalmologist who laughed handsomely at the amount of reading I reported myself as doing. I found that odd, in Oxford. I doubt that I was reading as much as, for example, many dons, or my neighbour the Reverend Professor Sir Henry Chadwick, whose elegant figure might be seen daily as he got into the car on the way to the library in order to set about the Early Church with grace and vigour; and he, after all, was rising to the challenge of manuscript with eyes that had been working for all but a half century longer than my own.

  I was reading those soft options, novels, printed (one might have thought) in typefaces congenial to the eye, faces confected to encourage and reward the process of reading.

  I got more drops.

  I took seventy or so books home to the Hebrides, where part of me had been a child. I rented a wee cottage down the drive from my adopted family, so that I might work. My family visited on a generously formal basis. There were painful family events occurring, than which any passing funny business with my eyes was far less harrowing. Also, my sisters, who are not really my sisters, each noticed, with her own fine eyes, that things had got better with those bad peepers since I had ‘come home’. That was so. The air in the Western Isles is cleaner than it is in Oxford. Certain stresses were removed. I read around seven hundred pages a day, took notes, wrote letters. For the first time since late childhood, I did not accompany my family as they walked around the island. If I had done I might have fallen off it, but I didn’t say that to anyone. A heron came each morning and stood in the burn among the reeds, his small knees like knots.

  I went across to Edinburgh, leaving the island on my own for the first time in my life. I cried when I left as the sea widened between the ferry and the island. I do not often cry, but crying has proved to be one of the few things that wash clear my sight, however briefly. I’ve been trying to take it up more.

  I watched the island go, and the other islands pass: Jura, Islay, Mull, the Grey Dogs, the Isles of the Sea.

  I went through, as the process of crossing Scotland’s waist is called, to Edinburgh, did a reading over breakfast of a short story or two to an audience in the mirrored tent at the Book Festival, which has been a kind of annual transfusion for me in the many years during which I have read more than I have written (which is not hard), and then bolted for a train down to London for another meeting of the Man Booker Prize judges.

  I’d been going to fly, but a terrorist incident had grounded all planes and put the nation on its guard against, among other things, carriers of lipstick, scent or fountain pens. Guilty on all counts, I packed my longish frame and a 900-page novel into the vestibule, as the greased-up hinge between carriages of a passenger train is fabulously designated, of a southbound train, and settled to some hours’ standing room only.

  I minded even more than usual being photographed, as we all were, for the long list press meeting. It wasn’t–only–vanity, it was an acute sense that I couldn’t open my eyes. But when making a point or really engaging with the other judges, I could momentarily see into their faces. I realised that this peeled state of being was mind-altering and, while quite useful for an indentured servant of fiction, and a state desirable if it might be useful to the artist in one, not much good in a mother or a friend.

  I returned to the North, relieved to be leaving the Quaker club where I had been staying in a bed off whose end I hung. In the night I had met polite dressing-gowned ghosts of either sex in the corridors, between fire doors, up in Town for a play or to clock the City churches. In each room at the clu
b is a list of local things worth visiting which reads like a list of my great-aunts’ enthusiasms, those penurious educated lonely accomplished women. I could feel the fulcrum tipping as I passed into my own past and with some relief felt young no more.

  LENS I: Chapter 2

  In Edinburgh, as always happens, I took a lease of life and shared it with my younger son. We had a happy few days listening to authors, a really peculiar thing to enjoy doing, but we do. I continued to see jokes and architectural detail, two things that keep me going, though only as it were in stroboscopic clatters of vision.

  My son returned to school and autumn was upon us.

  Opposite me in Oxford lived two neurologists. The wife was slight, pretty, part-Chinese. By now, if I did have friends to visit, I was experimenting with wearing a green hat indoors to see whether this soothed my sight. I had accommodated to the difficulty of combining walking with seeing by capping the reclusion I had been working on for a decade with completely hermetic habits. I had stopped attending all meetings, including AA, save those for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006.

  I visited the GP once more and met a new doctor, young, surrounded by books; on his wall–I saw!–was my favourite New Yorker cartoon, showing a snail in love with a Sellotape dispenser. I told him what had happened, that my world had narrowed quite and that I found it difficult to open my eyes.

  He used a word that made complete sense, a direct lift from the Greek. It was very rare, he said, but it did exist. The word was blepharospasm. Blepharon comes up a lot in Homer, and is the Greek for eyelid. Spasm was it.

  I was relieved that I had not been making all this up.