—It is,
she said
—like seeing my own death—
and she turned away, and refused to look again.
* * *
—
After I returned from Hay, Johannes and I clung to one another. Something had changed between us: Johannes no longer reassured me that things would be all right and I no longer tried to talk about my fears because to do so seemed to wound him and I wanted above all that he should not look so sad. There was a breaking distance in the way we were so careful with one another. Although we were in contact with one another always, a hand on a shoulder, a leg slung across a knee, our fingers reaching out to twine about the other’s, it was not for comfort but rather because it felt that to let go would be to risk a loss that would be absolute. At night we lay awake, our arms around one another, and although in the silence we pressed ourselves together, trying to reach one another, between our naked bellies there was a barrier that we couldn’t break and we remained apart. Once from nowhere Johannes cried
—I can’t bear it,
but I could offer no comfort, not even that which comes from conjoint suffering.
In the end it was nothing at all which brought resolution. We went away, together this time, walking for ten days in Cornwall along the coast path from Falmouth round the Lizard to Land’s End as though in this steady progress westward we might outdistance ourselves. We walked until my mouth filled with the taste of salt and iron, scrambling from sea to cliff-crest and back again with the turn of each cove, hours of arduous labour lost in the traversal of a few straight miles. Once, pausing for breath, looking out from the edge of the cliff at the sea five hundred feet below, we saw a peregrine falcon hovering barely an arm-span away from us and almost on a level, watchful and still, its spotted grey wings barely moving in the updraft, and I felt myself touched by something—privilege perhaps, or luck—that came, after so many months, like a sight of the first green growth through winter earth. We carried a tent, split between our two packs. At the end of each day’s walking my skin was covered in a rime of salt, half sweat and half evaporated surf, so that rubbing my fingers on my face it came away in grubby curls, and after dinner in one pub or another we crawled into our tent before dark and in the gentle, subaquatic murk the canvas made of the evening sun, we slept. We barely spoke to one another. At first it was because we had nothing to say that had not been said already but by the middle of the week I felt that it was because we had been emptied out, poured into the rough path, our thoughts nothing more than surface, as routine and repetitive as the passage of the summer breakers up the beaches. In our matched strides we had found a mute accord which had been lacking for months, our only current concerns the cresting of each rise and the need to reach a campsite in time to pitch a tent before the pubs stopped serving dinner. The weather for most of the week was uniformly clear and hot and in the middle of each day we scrambled down off the path to the sea and ate our packed lunches side by side, facing out across the North Atlantic, bread and cheese and packets of crisps after which I swam, the water so clear that I could see shoals of tiny blue fish in it; but on the last day it rained, a thick and heavy summer storm, the clouds descended down low so that air and water merged into a heavy, directionless grey spume and when we reached Land’s End at last we couldn’t even see as far as the edge of the point. We waited in line with all the other thwarted sightseers to have our picture taken by the signpost to John O’Groats and felt a sense of disjunction, after the solitary days, to be surrounded by such crowds of people, all of them looking askance at our dirty faces and the soaking, mud-splattered clothes we’d been wearing all week. Sitting on the bus back to Penzance we said how funny it was to have been striving so hard to reach a place so completely lacking in any kind of peace or beauty, so forbidding of contemplation, as though we had undertaken a pilgrimage to a supermarket, and we laughed. At the station we booked ourselves onto that night’s sleeper and spent the balance of the afternoon and early evening drinking in the station bar, our wet things steaming on a radiator, and I realised, standing on the chipped tiles of the pub toilet looking in the mirror at my half-burned face, that at some point in the week I had outdistanced my anxiety. After all, my decision had been made months ago. I knew that I wanted a child and it was only the point of crossing from the abstract to the particular which was at issue, that gap I saw between myself and the people who were mothers already, my fear of being found wanting, but I was not alone—there was Johannes, strong where I was not, and after all we were only people and a part of us was made for this, I wouldn’t fail any further than others did; but most of all I had exhausted myself with indecision and was too tired for any more of it. I wanted to think about something else. I wanted the whole thing to be over and done, and the only way for that to happen was for me to do that thing which I had wanted from the start.
* * *
—
Reading Röntgen’s paper for the first time one sunny afternoon at my desk in the library I had been able to follow the thread of it with comparative ease; and surely this was the last time that such a feat was possible: the framing of a radical scientific discovery in ordinary language, the ability to impart understanding without first having to construct a language in which to do so. Röntgen’s description of his work comes like the unravelling of a magician’s illusion which, explained, quickens rather than diminishing, the understanding of its working conferring the illusion of complicity—the impression that we, too, might be so deft, so sure; and within weeks of the paper’s publication interest in it, both academic and popular, had exploded. During 1896, forty-nine books and 1,044 scientific papers were published on the subject of X-rays, as well as newspaper reports and editorials, magazine articles, cartoons and sketches. Into the tail end of a repressive century it came like the promise of a change in the weather, that unsettling notion that far from the troublesome corporeality of bodies being obscured by their enfolding layers of lawn and calico they might themselves become transparent, giving up their secrets to a gaze. By the summer of 1896 there were slot machines in Chicago that would X-ray your hand, and at that year’s Electrical Exhibition in New York there was a tent in which the boxes stood one beside another in rows and people queued up to use them, the lines stretching backwards to the door. Afterwards, congregating in groups, talking in whispers as one might do in church, their eyes shone with the wonder of conversion and they said that during those few moments when they had seen their hands dissected on a screen they had received confirmation of their place among the living; or else they saw what Bertha Röntgen had done and in the peculiar repetitiveness of the images, each skeleton so like the last, they found the unindividuated mass of bones that we will all become. All through that year and the next, the enthralling mystery X-rays represented, their apparent promise, the sense they brought of a future already overtaken and inhabited, was such that when in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a man claimed to have used X-rays to transmute base metal into gold, finding the philosopher’s stone in a cathode-ray tube, for a while he was almost believed; and why not, since if a solid body might become transparent—if one might step inside a fairground booth and see the bones of one’s own hand—if one might pay a dime and see one’s life or death—then what after all might be possible, what understood—and surely this is what brought them, all that summer, running to the fairground booths: the promise of the simplifying power of explanation, sight: that knowing the constitution of their bodies they might be granted understanding of their minds.
* * *
—
Ten days after seeing my GP about my headaches, I went to the local hospital for an MRI scan. This hospital, tucked behind a busy road and hedged with bus stops, was nothing like the one I had so often visited with my mother, where well-tended gardens functioned as a euphemism does, to cushion and obscure, but was instead a vast and sprawling complex of concrete and peeling paint, its central portion grown i
ncrementally outwards, extended and tacked on to as though it were trying to reproduce itself, scaffolding poles like aerial roots hanging from its walls and squat, shrub-like Portakabins sprouting from its car parks and what might once have been its lawns. Anxiety made me hurry as I walked into the main building’s busy foyer but it took so long to find the right place that I was barely punctual by the time I presented myself at the MRI unit’s reception desk. There I was given a sheaf of forms to fill in and directed to a corridor where half a dozen others sat already on plastic chairs lined up against both walls, each trying to keep as far from the others as they could. After a slight hesitation I picked a seat at the far end of the left-hand row next to a large man with a face which was badly swollen around its right eye, the skin about the socket stretched smooth, his eyebrow a muddled burr across a discoloured patch the size of a tangerine. Sitting down beside him, maintaining polite separation in this public space, I wished for a moment that instead of this withdrawal I might have the nerve to catch his gaze—but to do so would have been to pretend to a solidarity with him which I wasn’t entitled to, because, after all, I was unlikely to be seriously ill, whereas he already had a slightly rotten look, his skin the flat, yellowish-white of sheep’s cheese. We sat for nearly an hour, the pair of us, side by side, and all that time he remained unmoving apart from his thumbs, which he tapped gently and soundlessly against one another in a complicated rhythm I couldn’t find the knack of, and I wondered if perhaps he was reciting some list or prayer in his head, a strengthening psalm or an accounting of all that stood to be lost; but when at last a nurse came and called him he stood up straight and square and greeted her with friendly courtesy, and so perhaps after all it had only been the waiting which had bothered him and my anxiously examined pity, my assumption that I must have what he did not—health, strength—and could therefore confer upon him with my glance some warmth of comfort, was only another form of conceit.
When my own turn came the same nurse led me further into the building, down corridors which smelled of linoleum and disinfectant and through a door into a tiny, white-walled cubicle where, left alone, I stripped off my clothes and put on instead a blue serge hospital gown, stiff from the laundry, its hemmed edges scratchy against the nape of my neck. My own things—my trousers and T-shirt, my shoes, the silver bracelet I wore all that year and my earrings and glasses—I placed in a locker; and so, stripped and blinded, it was as though I had been divested of all those complicated trappings which made me into myself, leaving nothing beyond them but the featureless core; and I felt that I was approaching, not a routine medical examination, but some ritual of passage, a proof at last of all that constituted me. Another nurse came and took me into the room where the scanner was and I lay down on its waiting pallet, my head enclosed inside a frame, my knees raised on a cushion. Things were explained to me but without my glasses I found it hard to concentrate, the technician’s words emerging indistinctly from a haze of colour. I was given a button to press in case claustrophobia should cause me to panic but without my glasses myopia had already enclosed me, cutting the comprehensible world down to a few inches of recognisable space, and I had no choice but to surrender, which was itself a relief after the months in which I had fought to keep myself in motion: here at last I was taken care of and might rest. Despite the headphones I had been given the volume of the machine’s working was almost overwhelming, a roar of turning metal which occupied my skull, replacing thought with sound. I lost my sense of time and it began to feel as though I might have been fixed in that position, my head held in its cage, my knees on their pillow, for some elastic version of forever, and that I had reached at last a sort of crisis, a crux or an apotheosis after the months of anxious emptiness: that caught there, stuck inside an enormous white box, helpless and bare, I had become a pivot on which my life might turn; but afterwards, sat in the consultant’s office with a picture of my brain spread out against a lightbox, I felt nothing. This was not how I had imagined it. I had thought that, seeing the illuminated image of that part of myself which was the keeper of the rest pinned up against a screen, the details of its operation picked out in nebulae of colour, I might know at last that I was solid, sure, and that I was well-made; and I had thought that I would recognise it, this invisible part of myself where consciousness resided, that I would know it was mine as an infant knows its mother, and that at last the understanding buried deep inside it would be made accessible, but this could have been a picture of anyone and I felt only a sort of dull surprise that what I saw should be a part of me at all. It told me nothing. I sat in my chair and listened patiently while the consultant explained that there was nothing obviously wrong with me—the scan was clear. I would be referred, she said, to a headache clinic, but there was a waiting list and in the interim I should continue with my routine of pain killers, avoid alcohol, try and sleep regularly; then, early the next year when the letter came with the time of my appointment, my headaches had gone. I had met Johannes. A shift had occurred and my mother’s death was no longer present but past, its recalling an understanding of pattern instead of a wound, something woven into me, a part of that composite I had become which was a fraction of what I might have been; and this feat had been achieved not through understanding but only by familiarity of occupation, and by the passage of time.
II
When at last the long bell of my mother’s death had ceased to sound, after the obliteration of her belongings in the skip and the scouring that my illness had been, after I had met Johannes, I felt for a long time that the past mattered very little. I lacked curiosity as much as I lacked material for it. My mother had been all that was left of my family and to accept the absolute nature of her loss, its insusceptibility to reconstruction through the careful husbanding of facts or objects, was almost a badge of honour. On those occasions when I thought about it at all, I considered myself to have done well in avoiding the temptation to become curator, the embalmer of my mother’s memory. Even after my daughter was born—even after she had reached an age at which she showed interest when my mother’s name was mentioned or when I saw how shadowy to her was the figure of this other grandmother, as distinct from Johannes’ mother who was so pointedly alive, with her trips to the zoo and the national gallery, or to the Dutch church at Austin Friars—even then I felt little more than inconvenienced by the need to traverse with my child such difficult territory as inherited grief. Trying to articulate it once to Johannes, explaining during one of those evenings in the first years of our daughter’s life when she slept spreadeagled in her cot as though unconsciousness had assaulted her, knocking her out, while we lay next to one another on the sofa like the survivors of some localised disaster, I told him that the past is as prosaic as the future and the facts about it only so much stuff. To pick through dusty boxes, to sift through memories which fray and tear like ageing paper in an effort to find out who we are, is to avoid the responsibility of choice, since when it comes to it we have only ourselves, now, and the ever-narrowing cone of what we might enact. Growing up, I said, is a solitary process of disentanglement from those who made us and the reality of it cannot be avoided but only, perhaps, deferred—and my discarding of the physical manifestation of the past, the emptying of my mother’s house piece by piece into a rain-filled skip, had been a statement of intent and with it I had let myself be unencumbered—
—But you aren’t,
Johannes said.
—You are not unencumbered.
* * *
—
My mother was an only child and my grandmother a psychoanalyst known to everyone, myself included, as Doctor K. This name didn’t strike me as strange. It was to me only another part of the landscape of my childhood and I regarded it with solipsistic insularity, the assumption by one whose age is still in single figures that the world was what I saw of it and everything familiar was also ordinary, so that I was almost into my teens before I thought to ask her about it. We stood in her kitch
en, the table between us and on it the knife that she had been using to chop vegetables, she having set this task aside so that she might offer my question the attention she believed that it deserved. This was a trick of hers: to treat conversation as an activity which should be given full attention, weighed against the virtue of silence, so that talking to her one might never have anywhere to hide one’s face.
—Names,
she said
—are symbols. Particularly those we allocate to ourselves, and not knowing what to say in response I said nothing, but only stood and felt myself grow hot under her gaze until at last, satisfied, she picked up her knife again and went on with chopping carrots.
About my grandfather I know almost nothing. He was gone before my mother was born and left behind him little sense of absence, no space or lack, no mark to show how he might have fitted with us. On those occasions in childhood that I asked my mother about him, empty Saturday afternoons when I drifted bored about the house looking for threads to pull, she claimed to know only that he had worked at one of the journals that my grandmother contributed to and, if pressed, she would go to the large bookcase in the hall on which we kept our good books, the hardbacks and the row of old Penguins with their yellow spines, the classics in translation and the poetry, and she would take down a copy of the collected Kipling between whose fragile pages she kept a photograph of a man sat on a beach, a stretch of runnelled sand beyond which squat, grass-topped dunes rose to an indifferent sky. I don’t know if the Kipling was a joke but
—There he is,
and she would pass the glossy sheet to me and go back to whatever she had been doing before my question interrupted her, leaving the book on the hall table to be refilled and replaced when I was done.
Sight Page 5
