Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  * * *

  —

  On a wet Saturday morning, Johannes and I went to see his mother to tell her that I was pregnant. She picked us up from the station in her car as she always did and drove us back to the tall and narrow house Johannes had grown up in, him in the front talking about the general progress of his work and me, trying not to be sick, in the back. The house, cleaned for our arrival, felt unoccupied, as though it were up to us to claim the space, leaving our jumpers on the backs of chairs as marks of ownership, our socks balled up in corners, our books spine-upwards on the sofa cushions, the dust motes floating in the light from the hallway window gusted by the currents that our voices and our moving bodies made. We carried our things up to the bedroom in which we would sleep and while Johannes went back down I unpacked my pyjamas and the bag with our toothbrushes and toothpaste in it, then set to untangling the coiled wire of my phone charger, stringing these tasks out for as long as I could. I hoped that Johannes might tell his mother while I was up there so that I might be spared, because I have always hated the breaking of news, the imparting of information which will affect another’s life in however slight a way. I find it horrible to think that others might have such power over me, always: that at any moment there might be someone in a room elsewhere planning the best way to break open my life. Earlier I had asked Johannes, hearing myself sound petulant

  —Can’t you call her first and tell her so it won’t be a surprise?

  but Johannes, frowning, said

  —She’ll prefer it this way,

  and so I waited for as long as I could before going downstairs to where Johannes and his mother sat at the well-scrubbed kitchen table, the old green teapot and a silence like elastic set between them. I went to stand by Johannes’ shoulder as though he might shield me and he held my hand as at last he spoke; and afterwards in the relief of having got it over with I felt a little giddy, prone to confidences, and we drank our tea and made plans and the gentle chatter of the radio turned on in the corner lent our conversation a pleasing intimacy, as though we were afraid, in this otherwise empty house, of being overheard.

  Later I lay resting in the neat spare room while Johannes sat downstairs reading or watching television. There was a knock on the door and his mother came in, bringing me up a glass of warm milk with honey in it and some ginger biscuits from a batch that she had made earlier that afternoon, her hands deep in a jar of flour while I sat in a chair and watched her, wondering if such easy competence, such orderly familiarity with the making of things, was a skill that I might ever achieve. She placed the plate of biscuits and the milk on the bedside table and when I asked her she fetched me a glass of water as well because I was always thirsty. This gentle solicitude felt at that moment like a slight return to childhood, like being put to bed with flu and having the doctor come, that certainty of being protected, and as she moved about me, arranging things, I realised that this was what I had been longing for: to have someone place themselves between me and adulthood, taking away for a while the necessity to make sense of things. She sat down on the bed beside me and took my hand.

  —How are you feeling?

  she asked and

  —Okay,

  I said,

  —Tired.

  I told her that there were days when I went to bed straight after dinner, the evening news not yet finished on the radio, and although I slept all night when I woke in the morning still I felt the same exhaustion, a chemical thing, utterly undentable. I asked

  —Is this how everyone feels?

  and she told me how when pregnant with Johannes, working in a theatre, she would go during every break she had to lie down in the room in the costume department where the washing machines were kept and, lulled by their constant grumbling and the rocking of their spin cycles, she would sleep. Then, she said, after Johannes was born, for weeks the only place he would reliably sleep was in front of the washing machine, and so she would set his Moses basket down on the floor in their galley kitchen and put a load of washing on and he would sleep for the whole cycle; and not wanting to leave him alone, this her first child and his fragility unquantifiable, she would pull a duvet down from the bedroom upstairs and wrap herself in it and she would lie on the floor next to him and she would sleep, too, both of them calmed by the rattle of the spinning drum.

  —In the first few weeks after a new baby is born you do things like that,

  she said, telling me that it was a slight and temporary madness brought on by exhaustion—the trauma of a birth you don’t have time to recover from and the need to find any pattern amongst so much endless chaos, any routine, however tenuous, and any continuity of preference which might allow you to feel that you know this tiny stranger who has ripped so much apart: your body, your home, your life. I thought of these words often in the days after my daughter was born when I suffered from an acute but transitory agoraphobia, a terror that if I took the baby outside I would become incapable, unable to protect her from some catastrophe I could neither imagine nor name. Each day I forced myself to put her in a sling, her body nestled tight against me, so that I might walk to the end of the road and back while Johannes stood at the front door and watched me as I asked him to, his expression one of kindness without understanding, and I held the thought of Johannes’ mother like a talisman—this tall and capable woman, determined, calm, lying with her baby for hours each day on the kitchen floor, manufacturing washing just for the peace—and it comforted me. Now, sat in her spare room discussing in low voices the trivia of our own experiences, I felt for the first time between the two of us the taut lines of a relationship that was not triangulated through Johannes: being each a part of this child’s life we were now tied to one another and this tie was indissoluble—could be evaded, perhaps, but neither destroyed nor forgotten. This new intimacy was an unintended consequence but I recognised it too as something that I longed for, a surer place in this house, a claim over this woman’s care; and I wondered if it was partly why I had been chary of coming here, because I could see how it might be an imposition, effected without her consent and not subject to her protest.

  After she had gone I lay in bed, peaceful for the first time in weeks, and thought of my own mother, how what I had been feeling the lack of since the evening that I found out that I was pregnant was not the particularity of her, but rather the role she might have occupied and the fulfilment of those tasks for whose performance she would have been the obvious candidate; and this is what I miss still, now: a sense of enduring belonging, the knowledge that a place is mine regardless of the extent to which I might merit it. I would have that undemanded, undemanding love, not dependent on individuals but rather on the places that they hold—mother, daughter; except that as I no longer hold that place I cannot now imagine how it might feel to do so, since to cease to have a mother is to forget, as well, how to be a daughter. Lying in the bed at Johannes’ mother’s house, I could neither transpose myself backwards nor see my own mother alive, our relationship forged into adulthood. What space she might have occupied had long ago been filled or had silted up—and this is the thing about death, that time lessens hurt but multiplies loss. I wanted to be able to say that after all it would have been better to have my own mother there than Johannes’ but I couldn’t, because the thought of it was an empty hypothesis; and because while my own mother had faded into imperfect memory Johannes’ was here, present, a woman whose feet creaked across the floorboards of the room next door—and since I found I didn’t want my mother there I found that I also missed her terribly.

  * * *

  —

  Leaving the army after three years, John Hunter began the long struggle to establish himself in his profession. He worked at first as a dentist, pursuing an interest in the transplantation of human teeth, pulling them from the heads of those who needed the money and placing them instead in the mouths of those who could afford to pay. These rudimentar
y transplants would, he noticed, have greater success if the donor tooth was fresh, and if it was approximately the same size as that which had been lost, and although none of his transplants would have been fully successful some of them are reported to have remained in place for a period of years, which was a considerable achievement for the time. In 1764 he set up his own anatomy school, a rival establishment to William’s, and he began, at last, in private practice, on top of which he pursued his own research, working late and rising early and experimenting with little in the way of ethical concern on both his patients and, almost certainly, on himself. Money was always an issue. In addition to the ever-expanding London premises needed to house both his family and pupils, and his growing collection of surgical preparations, as soon as he could afford to he took a country house at Earl’s Court where he kept a menagerie, a collection of animals of greater or lesser exoticism which he observed in life and then, dead, took to pieces. He took the temperature of hibernating hedgehogs, fed dye to pigs to prove that bone growth occurs by accumulation at the outer ends, collected fossils, crossbred dogs with jackals. To Edward Jenner, friend and ex-pupil, he wrote, “I have but one order to send you which is send every thing you can get either animal vegetable or mineral, and the compound of the two viz either animal or vegetable mineralised.”

  Jenner, who after three years as John’s pupil had turned down an offer of a partnership, had left London in 1773 to return to his native Gloucestershire and a country practice; but the two maintained their relationship by correspondence, Jenner’s letters lost but John’s surviving, ungrammatical, enthused, a list of requests to be sent hedgehogs and cuckoos, eels, porpoise, along with instructions for experiments to be performed, treatments to be tried. The specimens sent by Jenner and those gleaned from Hunter’s Earl’s Court zoo along with thousands of others—skeletons hung from wires, soft tissues pickled in jars and skins dried, venous networks transcribed in wax—form Hunter’s greatest monument: a vast collection, a testament to skill and curiosity which he nearly bankrupted himself to maintain and which was saved, after his death, by the dedicated ministrations of his last apprentice, William Clift, to become at last the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, housed now in their premises behind Holborn station. Walking through it one Saturday afternoon with Johannes, nearing the end of my first pregnancy, I felt at that vast catalogue of the interior, the mechanics of living things, an awe that bordered on bafflement, something important written too large for me to comprehend. Setting out from home we had intended to visit the John Soane museum, that other extraordinary monument to the eighteenth-century collectors’ art which sits on the opposite side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields from the Hunterian, its contents a map of that which is neither skin nor muscle but which seems, in the narrow corridors of Soane’s house, to be as traceable. We had been there several times before and, planning with Johannes a last afternoon spent in that casual, wandering pursuit of curiosity which had made up so much of our leisure time to date but which would soon become, we supposed, less possible, I had thought immediately of the John Soane, its dim rooms and cluttered walls, its jokes, the monk’s cell and the sarcophagus and the tiny gallery with its paintings fixed to shutters so that a man with a sort of boat hook has to open them for you one by one to reveal the vast and complicated skies of Turner, the satirical figures of Hogarth’s modern moral subjects. It is a place that has always given me, stepping over the threshold, a rush of delight, the joy that something so extraordinary should exist; but arriving that day with Johannes we found the museum closed for a private event and so made our way instead around the dusty perimeter of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its central stretch of grass browned by the summer’s heat to straw, past the tall red-brick gate leading to the inn itself, to the Royal College of Surgeons on the first floor of which, in a double-height gallery of glass cases, the Hunterian museum is housed.

  —Are you sure,

  Johannes had said that morning as I struggled to tie my own shoelaces

  —you wouldn’t rather stay at home?

  but I had been determined. It had always seemed to me during the long, meandering weekend days which had formed such a large part of our lives to date as though, while we were looking at these artefacts of other lives, something important was not quite being said, an utterance that existed in the spaces between our words and tied us, in our silent understanding of it, together; and we had taken it for granted, this intimate harmonic which implied concordance, until it was gone. All week, through another appointment with the midwife, the doctor, through a discussion of birth plans and a consideration of the relative merits of muslin brands, Moses baskets, this proliferation of necessary trivia which had come upon me like a curse, I had felt myself becoming increasingly unfamiliar, emptied out of all the thoughts I’d had before and refilled with these new concerns; and the stranger I became the stranger too Johannes was, different and far away, until the old presumption of ease was replaced with an algorithm of concern and debt. When we were alone together, when we sat down to eat or when we walked in the park during the long, light evenings, our pace a poor equivocation between Johannes’ long stride and my ponderous shamble, I was not peaceful but spoke at length, planning out a future that we hadn’t yet the means to imagine, my speech an obsessive examination of the possible ways that we might live after the baby was born, how we might divide the labour up, and what we needed, what there was to do and what might be left till later. I harangued and argued with myself, considered out loud the possible effects of a weight of historical wrongs, the flaws in our respective characters, the way I wished things might be done, as though I might talk myself into quietness or as though, by talking, I might call into being there between the heavy summer alders the best possible version of ourselves—as though I might make myself ready; but I could not prepare myself for something so unknown nor find any way across the next months except by living them, and so my monologue was little more than benediction, the filling up of empty space with prayer. I didn’t know what to do with myself otherwise. All that I had been before I had given up already and the emptiness was appalling. I twitched to be active and longed to feel Johannes close again and so I insisted that we fill our time with those things we had always done and then, embarked upon them, was angered by my inability to see them through, or exhausted by my stubborn perseverance. Through all this Johannes was patient, or he seemed that way to me; but even his patience was unsatisfactory. I wanted something more than calm capitulation to my ill-made plans, attention to my tumbled words. I wanted him to care as much as I did about those things which I wished I could not care about myself, or I wanted him to tell me how dull I had become so that in retaliation I might break myself open against him, crack violently through this shell that separated us, and we might be ourselves again—

  As we walked through the gift shop and into the museum I said

  —We could go for lunch after this. We could go to the Seven Stars. Or to somewhere on the South Bank. We could have dim sum.

  —Won’t you be tired?

  Johannes asked, and because I was already tired, because I wished that I was at home and that we had never come out, because my feet ached and the baby kicking was a constant irritation, I pulled my hand away from his and let him go on ahead.

  * * *

  —

  At a meeting of the Royal Society on 27 January 1780, thirty years after William had watched and Rymsdyk had sketched while John teased apart the fabric of a nameless woman’s uterus, twenty-six years after William published under his own name the discovery of the mechanism of placental blood supply, John accused William of plagiarism. This was, perhaps, the result of a long-festering complaint: that for all the work John had done for William during the twelve years he had been his assistant, John had received no credit, and nor had he been able to take ownership of any of the preparations that he had made during that time and which now formed the nexus of William’s own collection, leaving John
’s, though its specimens were now numbered in the thousands, always incomplete. Being unable to rectify this wrong, he niggled at that which would have seemed to him the lesser—the apportioning of published credit—although in the end there would be no satisfactory outcome to this dispute for either party. The Royal Society would refuse to publish John’s paper. William, beyond a single confused and confusing response, would offer no defence but, on his death, would leave every part of his fortune including the farmhouse at Long Calderwood to his nephew Matthew Baillie, and his collection to the University of Glasgow; and, subsequently, it would turn out that priority for the discovery would after all go to neither brother but to a Dutch anatomist, Wilhelm Noortwyk, who had demonstrated the separation of maternal and foetal blood supply in 1743.