and if, afterwards, I was unable to see quite how deeply grief ran, if I felt I had no right to my unhappiness, then in part I think it was because I was ashamed that this last journey home was one that I had made, not out of love, nor even from compassion, but only from expediency, because it was necessary and because there was no one else to do it.
* * *
—
In 1890 in the physics department of the University of Pennsylvania, five years before Wilhelm Röntgen made his observations on the effect of a new kind of rays, Arthur Goodspeed placed an unexposed photographic plate beneath a pile of coins on a table next to a Crookes tube, the same piece of equipment that would lead Röntgen to his discovery. Later, when the plate was developed, Goodspeed found on it in place of the image he was expecting a series of small, round shadows, speckled blotches, as though it were the jacket of a book left lying on a windowsill for months, its ink bleached by the sun to leave a sharp outline of what had sat on top of it. He kept the plate, because it was a curiosity or a puzzle—and five years later, after he had read Röntgen’s paper and seen the pictures which accompanied it, X-rays of weights inside a box or bones inside a hand, Goodspeed repeated the work that he had done before, and found, as he had suspected, that the image was the result of the plate’s exposure to X-rays. This picture, reproduced, appears both old and accidental, like liver spots on skin or something spilled, the two circles left by the coins distinct but not entire, their edges collapsing on one side, the blackness of their shadows bleeding into grey, and seeing it I find myself constructing an image of Doctor Arthur Willis Goodspeed, stood in his laboratory with its view across the campus gardens to the Schuylkill river, as he performed with good grace those experiments which would prove that he, unlike Röntgen, had suffered a failure, not of understanding, nor quite of luck, but of something in between—a felicity which is both attention and timing.
* * *
—
Shortly after I first met Johannes we spent an afternoon together at the Victoria and Albert museum. It was a Saturday and I walked to the museum from Marble Arch station, across Hyde Park to the Albert Memorial, skirting the edge of the Serpentine. That week had brought a false spring, a parting of winter’s drapes to let through light and air into the early part of March, an unexpectedly warm sun still low enough in the sky that its illumination mimicked that of late summer, September’s heavy gold across the bare branches of the trees, the only colour in the flowerbeds from the purple petals of the banked-up hellebore. By the next weekend drear grey would confine us again to our coats and scarves and we would stay that way for another month or more, but for now there was an impression of unexpected possibility. I was nervous. This outing had been my idea and I was worried about how it might go, that I might have a bad time or that Johannes might, so that one or the other of us would have to stutter our excuses after an hour and leave, the slow disappointed deflation of a hoped-for connection come to nothing. We had, until this point, hardly ever been alone together, meeting only accidentally and in company, through mutual friends, and I was afraid that this alteration in the balance of our relationship would bring with it an awkwardness, or that we would find out that we had, after all, little to say to one another.
Entering through the wide doors that lead in from Cromwell Gardens and walking across the wide atrium of the museum’s central lobby, we turned without any particular intent to the right, passing through an arch into the mediaeval galleries, those long corridors with their rood screens and panel paintings, their carvings and assorted armoury, relics of a past which feels at once unimaginable and ordinary, its strangeness quotidian, like a different answer to a familiar question. For a long time we stood in front of an altarpiece, a peculiar, hallucinatory work made in Hamburg towards the end of the twelfth century, two wooden leaves sat either side of a central panel, the whole divided into forty-four smaller squares on which scenes from the Book of Revelation were painted, a meticulous rendering of the coming of the apocalypse. Image by image we were walked through the end of the world: the seven seals opened, the seven trumpets sounded, cracks appeared in the earth. Brimstone fell like black hail and through the narrowing streets of a mediaeval market town, bright rivers of blood carried drowning horses past the burghers leaning out from upper-storey windows: a world at its unmaking. Standing next to Johannes, the footsteps of other visitors cracking through the silence about us, I tried to imagine how it would be to go about one’s daily life with this picture hung above it, freshly painted—how it might fade into the background until its horrors would be taken for granted, drifting each day further from notice as they failed to come about. Instead I felt only what enormous coincidence existence consists of that it should have brought that picture here, and us—and how easily, how unwittingly we might break each possible future in favour of another and how, looking back, in place of what had been possible we would see only that thin contingent line, what happened, rising through the vast and empty darkness of what did not.
Afterwards, we wandered through the rest of the museum, the statues and ceramics fading into a grey expanse of time and place, and our conversation was a carefully trivial list of observations until, sitting in the cafe later on, Johannes started to tell me about his family, the unremarkable but intimate details of a variably happy childhood, his absconding English father forgiven, his mother resilient, a tall woman in a tall house with a view across the sea at Harwich, that grey stretch of water somewhere on the other side of which was the place she had been born. These facts, ordinary in themselves, were offered as a gift, a gesture of trust or intimacy made across the table, and searching about for something to show in return I could think only of my own mother, of how her death had seemed like a sudden event slowed down, a single shocking moment that went on for months. All through the summer that came after it, as I slid into grief’s silent central eye, falling asleep like a cat in sunny patches, on the corners of settees or curled on rugs, I dreamed that she wasn’t dead at all, and had only gone away without telling me; and now she had come back, forcing herself into the shadow-space of her absence—but she no longer fitted. Even in so short a time I had grown and changed—her house was gone and there was no bed for her in the flat I had replaced it with, no extra cup and saucer, no clothes. These dreams were horrible and waking from them I would find my hands clutching at my chest so hard that the nails left crescent indentations in the skin above my breasts. For minutes I would lie, paralysed, until at last the silence of my empty flat began to reassert the truth: that what had happened was immutable and that my grief was earned, awful but particular, a possession whose ownership could not be rescinded.
—My mother died
I said to Johannes, and across the emptiness my words made I extended my hands towards him.
* * *
—
At last, even with me always present, the work of caring for my mother at home became too much. One morning, struggling from her bed to the bathroom, pushing a walking frame in front of her, she stumbled and fell, sitting down heavily on the carpet. She was unhurt but she no longer had the strength to stand back up again and although for a while I tried to right her, tugging her this way and that, bringing various items of furniture to use as props or levers, I was unable to lift her weight. I had to call an ambulance and because she wasn’t a priority we sat for hours, side by side on the bedroom floor, waiting for it to arrive. I made us lunch, sandwiches to eat on our knees, the sort of indoor picnic she had made me sometimes as a child on rainy Saturdays, and the fragile cast of this memory brought a kind of complicity between us, a resurgence of the intimacy that we had once possessed, so that for a while it was almost as though we were happy.
When at last the ambulance came the two paramedics between them managed to get her back on her feet. We refused their offer to take us to the hospital and they didn’t push, believing, I think, that we were right to do so; but the next day the district nurse
came and said that a bed had been made available for my mother at the hospice. I packed a bag for her, a rucksack with spare clothes, her phone and charger, and the book she had been pretending to read for weeks, too proud to tell me that her sight was failing: such a paltry collection of things but after all what else would she need that could be taken from this house. The hospice sent an ambulance of their own to collect us and we tried to give the journey a jaunty air, sucking boiled sweets to keep us from travel sickness in the lurching, windowless interior, and joking with the driver, but the sweets tasted dusty and our jokes fell flat, having the dull clang of cracked bells. Arriving we were shown to a tiny private room and I unpacked my mother’s things, plugged in the radio I had brought for us to listen to, went to find the cafe and came back with half-stale pastries. Beyond the rooms for consultations, for art therapy or massage, which made up the ground floor of the building, there was a walled garden, a surprisingly beautiful area of paths and overflowing flowerbeds, jasmine-hung arches and patches of sunny grass, and I said
—We could ask for a wheelchair and I could take you to sit outside. They have a pond—
but she refused, and that was that. A decision had been made, somewhere in the closing corridors of her mind: that she would no longer try to reach beyond herself, nor put aside the business of dying in favour of an experience she had no way of holding on to. She could have been generous. I might have liked to have, later on, this memory of sitting with her watching sunlight fall on water, a last fragment of accord, but she had nothing left to give me now, not even this. Her room became all there was to us, its grubby cream paintwork and its window with a view across the road, its smell of must and disinfectant. For a fortnight she lay on the bed and shrank into herself. Each morning I made this new journey, taking the bus and arriving early to sit beside her bed in the burgundy reclinable armchair that she refused to try and use. I brought her fruit she wouldn’t eat, grapes and mangoes, watermelon, and I read to her until she drifted into sleep and then I went and found the nurses or the ambulance drivers drinking tea on their break and told them how important it was that I be able to take my mother home again, my tearful fervour the result of a denial, not of how close my mother was to death, how it shivered about us, a long boundary to be crossed, but of how I wished it would be done because I was exhausted and because there was nothing I could do now but sit and watch, and even that was too much.
I had expected her death to be a radical change, a moment of perceptive clarity after which all would be altered, all rearranged, and so I was unprepared for what came instead: the long descending rallentando of these last few weeks—an extension, by slight degrees, of the gap between my mother’s thoughts, her words, her breaths, until at last I was able to stop waiting for the next to come. It was the middle of the night. I had stopped going home some days before and one of the nurses had brought me a blanket so that I might doze, off and on, in the chair by the bed, waking at intervals to see my mother’s eyes open or closed, to check the rise and fall of her chest. I thought of nothing and we were quite still; for the first time since her illness had begun I did not wish myself elsewhere. There was nothing to be done or said and nothing to be felt, and I sat and stared out of the window or slept; and on this last night I didn’t even sleep but only held my mother’s hand, leant forward with my head against her belly as I had lain sometimes in childhood when ill or needing comfort. And then, when I was sure, I pressed the button that hung down on a wire over her bed, and a nurse came, and everything was as it had been except that my mother was gone.
* * *
—
The work that Röntgen began late in 1895 he had been meaning to undertake for the best part of a year but it was only now, as the winter brought about its annual deceleration, returning students, technicians, professors to their homes, that he found the time. It was, to him, a matter of curiosity. He liked to repeat experiments others had already performed, not so much to check the veracity of their results as because this careful reconstruction, the slow rhythm of test and repeat, brought with it that particular quality of understanding which is got only by having seen for oneself: a grasp which is something like illumination, the reframing of proposition to fact so that the truth of it is felt, immediate. At such times, holidays of sorts when Röntgen could set aside the strictures of his academic interests in favour of a kind of happy tinkering, the boundary between work and hobby blurred, and alone in his laboratory that winter he began to repeat investigations into cathode rays which had earlier been performed by two others—by Heinrich Hertz, who had died on the first day of the previous year at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind him two small children and a proof of the existence of electromagnetic rays, and by Philipp Lenard, whose modifications to the Crookes cathode-ray tube had included a small, aluminium-covered window, preserving the pressure inside the tube but allowing the possibility of escape for the rays whose nature was, through such a process of deliberate tinkering, slowly being unravelled. Röntgen had been busy for a week already when on 8 November he noticed something glowing across the room from which all light had been excluded, and, walking towards the faint light, he found discarded on a workbench a sheet of paper which had been treated with barium platinocyanide, a chemical already recognised as useful because, in the presence of radiation, it would fluoresce.
Afterwards, Röntgen would become reticent on the subject of the work he had performed during those weeks. In addition to the paper in which he described his discovery he would give only a single interview, to an American journalist who happened to be passing through Würzburg during that brief period between the publication of Über Eine Neue Art von Strahlen and Röntgen’s return to that more ordinary research which constituted, to him, his life’s work. This interview was conducted across three languages—German and French, of which the journalist possessed only a partial understanding, and English, which Röntgen spoke as a language of conferences and equipment specifications, a technical dialect sufficient to explain only a sequence of events: the observation of light, the approach towards it—and it seems that the two spoke at cross purposes, their intentions unclear to one another. Röntgen appears to have been baffled by the journalist’s interest, his persistent attempts to force Röntgen towards an account, not of the work that he had done, its procedures and its progress, but of the way it had felt to do it. What, the journalist asked, did you think when you saw the faint glow across the laboratory? To which Röntgen answered, “I didn’t think; I investigated—”
but still I can’t believe it was so simple, the facts so baldly uninflected by that extra thing that meaning is, the part of truth which is the work of memory and mind, our own felt contribution to the way things are, and so I imagine it like this: the few short steps to bring Röntgen to a halt before the glowing paper as at a reliquary, and then the sudden rush of understanding—an opening up, the world reframed. This is what we cannot help but feel: that surely this was nothing less than gnosis, the penetration of mystery to show the nap of things, a pattern comprehended—and if we could understand these moments and the weeks that followed them when Röntgen, alone, placed object after object in front of his machine and saw them all transformed, then we too might know what it is to have the hidden made manifest: the components of ourselves, the world, the space between.
Sight Page 2
