I take all the food off the stove, carefully saving what can be used, and throwing the rest away—nearly everything. I sit and think: Well, if he rings me tomorrow…But I know he won’t. I realise, at last, that this is the end. I go to see if Janet is asleep—I know she is, but I have to look. Then I know that an awful black whirling chaos is just outside me, waiting to move into me. I must go to sleep quickly, before I become that chaos. I am trembling with misery and with tiredness. I fill a tumbler full of wine and drink it, quickly. Then I get into bed. My head is swimming with the wine. Tomorrow, I think—tomorrow—I’ll be responsible, face my future, and refuse to be miserable. Then I sleep, but before I am even asleep I can hear myself crying, the sleep-crying, this time all pain, no enjoyment in it at all.
[The whole of the above was scored through—cancelled out and scribbled underneath: No, it didn’t come off. A failure as usual. Underneath was written, in different hand-writing, more neat and orderly than the long entry, which was flowing and untidy:]
15th September, 1954
A normal day. During the course of a discussion with John Butte and Jack decided to leave the Party. I must now be careful not to start hating the Party in the way we do hate stages of our life we have outgrown. Noted signs of it already: moments of disliking Jack which were quite irrational. Janet as usual, no problems. Molly worried, I think with reason, over Tommy. She has a hunch he will marry his new girl. Well, her hunches usually come off. I realised that Michael had finally decided to break it off. I must pull myself together.
Free Women: 3
TOMMY ADJUSTS HIMSELF TO BEING BLIND WHILE THE OLDER PEOPLE TRY TO HELP HIM
Tommy hovered for a week between life and death. The end of that week was marked by Molly’s use of these words; her voice very far from its usual note of ringing confidence: “Isn’t it odd, Anna? He’s been hovering between life and death. Now he’s going to live. It seems impossible he shouldn’t. But if he had died, then I suppose we’d have felt that was inevitable too?” For a week the two women had sat by Tommy’s bed in the hospital; waited in side-rooms while doctors conferred, judged, operated; returned to Anna’s flat to care for Janet; received letters and visits of sympathy; and called on their reserves of energy to deal with Richard, who was openly condemning them both. During this week, while time stopped, and feeling stopped (they asked themselves and each other why they felt nothing but numbing suspense, although of course tradition authorised this reaction), they talked, though briefly and in shorthand, so to speak, since the points in question were so familiar to them both, of Molly’s care of Tommy, Anna’s relationship with him, to pinpoint the event or the moment when they had definitely failed him. Because Molly had gone away for a year? No, she still felt that was the right thing to have done. Because of the formlessness of their own lives? But how could they have been anything different? Because of something said or not said during Tommy’s last visit to Anna? Possibly, but they felt not; and how was one to know? They did not refer the catastrophe to Richard’s account; but when he accused them, replied: “Look, Richard, there’s no point in abusing each other. The thing is, what to do next for him?”
Tommy’s optic nerve was damaged; he would be blind. The brain was undamaged, or at least, would recover.
Now that he was pronounced out of danger, time established itself again, and Molly collapsed into hours of low and helpless weeping. Anna was very busy with her and with Janet, who had to be shielded from the knowledge that Tommy had tried to kill himself. She had used the phrase: “—had an accident,” but it was a stupid one, because now she could see in the child’s eyes the knowledge that the possibilities of an accident terrible enough to lay one flat on one’s back, permanently blinded, in hospital, lurked in the objects and habits of an every day. So Anna amended the phrase and said Tommy had accidently wounded himself cleaning a revolver. Janet then remarked that there was no revolver in their flat; and Anna said no, and there never would be, etc.; and the child came out of her anxiety.
Meanwhile Tommy, having been a silent shrouded figure in a darkened room, ministered to by the living and helpless in their hands, moved, came to life, and spoke. And that group of people, Molly, Anna, Richard, Marion, who had stood waiting, had sat waiting, had kept vigil through a timeless week, understood how far they had allowed him, in their minds, to slip beyond them into death. When he spoke it was a shock. For that quality in him, the accusing dogged obstinacy that had led him to try to put a bullet in his brain, had been obliterated in their thoughts of him as the victim lying shrouded under white sheets and bandages. The first words he said—and they were all there to hear them—were: “You’re there, aren’t you? Well, I can’t see you.” The way this was said kept them silent. He continued: “I am blind, aren’t I?” And again, the way this was spoken made it impossible to soften the boy’s coming back to life as it was their first impulse to do. After a moment, Molly told him the truth. The four stood around the bed, looking down at the head blind under moulding white tissues, and they were all of them sick with horror and with pity, imagining the lonely and brave struggle that must be going on. And yet Tommy said nothing. He lay still. His hands, the clumsy thick hands he had from his father, were lying by his sides. He lifted them, fumbled them together, and folded them on his chest, in an attitude of endurance. But in his way of making the gesture was something that caused Molly and Anna to exchange a look in which there was more than pity. It was a kind of terror—the look was like a nod. Richard saw the two women communicate this feeling, and literally ground his teeth with rage. It was no place to say what he felt; but outside he said it. They were walking together away from the hospital, Marion a little behind—the shock of what had happened to Tommy had stopped her drinking for the time, but she still seemed to move in a slowed world of her own. Richard spoke fiercely to Molly, turning hot and angry eyes on Anna, so as to include her: “That was a pretty bloody thing you did, wasn’t it?” “What?” said Molly, from inside Anna’s supporting arm. Now they were out of the hospital, she was shaking with sobs. “Telling him just like that, he’s blind for life. What a thing to do.” “He knew it,” said Anna, seeing that Molly was too shaken to talk, and knowing also that this was not what he was accusing them of. “He knew it, he knew it,” Richard hissed at them. “He had just come out of being unconscious and you tell him, he’s blind for life.” Anna said, answering his words but not his feeling: “He had to know.” Molly said to Anna, ignoring Richard, continuing the dialogue with Anna which had been begun in that silent confirming horrified glance over the hospital bed: “Anna, I believe he had been conscious for some time. He was waiting for us all to be there—it’s as if he were pleased about it. Isn’t it awful, Anna?” Now she broke into hysterical weeping, and Anna said to Richard: “Don’t take it out on Molly now.” Richard let out a disgusted inarticulate exclamation, wheeled back to Marion, who was vaguely following the three of them, impatiently took her arm, and went off with her across the vivid green hospital lawn that was systematically dotted with bright flower-beds. He drove off with Marion, not looking back, leaving them to find a taxi for themselves.
There never was a moment at which Tommy broke down. He gave no evidence of a collapse into unhappiness or self-pity. From the first moment, from his first words, he was patient, calm, co-operated pleasantly with the nurses and doctors, and discussed with Anna and Molly, and even with Richard, plans for his future. He was, as the nurses kept repeating—not without a touch of that uneasiness which Anna and Molly felt so strongly—“A model patient.” They had never known anyone, they said, and kept saying, let alone a poor young lad of twenty, faced with such an awful fate, take it so bravely.
It was suggested that Tommy should spend some time in a training hospital for the newly blind, but he insisted on returning home. And he had made such good use of his weeks in hospital that he was already handling his food, could wash and care for himself, could move slowly around his room. Anna and Molly would sit and watch him: normal ag
ain, apparently the same as he was before, save for the black shield over sightless eyes, moving with dogged patience from bed to chair, from chair to wall, his lips pursed in concentration, the effort of his will behind every small movement. “No thank you nurse, I can manage.” “No, mother, please don’t help me.” “No, Anna, I don’t need help.” And he didn’t.
It was decided that Molly’s living-room on the first floor must be turned over to Tommy—there would be fewer stairs for him to manage. This adaptation he was prepared to accept, but he insisted that her life and his should continue as before. “There’s no need to make any changes, mother, I don’t want anything to be different.” His voice had gone back to what they knew: the hysteria, the immanent giggle, the shrillness that had been in it on that evening he had visited Anna, had gone entirely. His voice, like his movements, was slow, full and controlled, every word authorised by a methodical brain. But when he said: “There’s no need to make changes,” the two women looked at each other, which it was safe to do now that he couldn’t see them (although they could not rid themselves of the suspicion that he knew it all the same) and they both felt the same dulled panic. For he used the words as if there had been no change, as if the fact that he was now blind was almost incidental, and that if his mother was unhappy about it it was because she chose to be, or was being fussy or nagging, like a woman becoming irritated by untidiness or a bad habit. He humoured them like a man humouring difficult women. The two watched him, looked, appalled, at each other, looked away again, watched helplessly while the boy made his tedious but apparently unpainful adjustment to the dark world which was now his.
The white cushioned window sills on which Molly and Anna had so often sat to talk, with the boxes of flowers behind them, the rain or the pale sunshine on the panes, were all that remained the same in this room. It now contained a narrow tidy bed; a table with a straight chair; some conveniently placed shelves. Tommy was learning Braille. And he was teaching himself to write again with an exercise book and a child’s ruler. His writing was quite unlike what it had been: it was large, square and clear, like a child’s. When Molly knocked to come in, he would raise his black-shaded face over the Braille or his writing and say “Come in,” with the temporarily though courteously granted attention of a man behind a desk in an office.
So Molly, who had refused a part in a play so as to be able to nurse Tommy, went back to her work and acted again. Anna ceased dropping over in the evenings when Molly was out at the theatre, for Tommy said: “Anna, you are very kind to come and take pity on me, but I’m not at all bored. I like being alone.” As he would have said it had he been an ordinary man who chose to prefer solitude. And Anna, who had been trying to get back to her intimacy with Tommy before the accident, and failing (she felt as if the boy were a stranger she had never known), took him at his word. She literally could not think of anything to say to him. And besides, alone in a room with him, she kept succumbing to waves of pure panic, which she did not understand.
And now Molly rang Anna, no longer from her home, since the telephone was immediately outside Tommy’s room, but from telephone boxes or from the theatre. “How is Tommy?” Anna would ask. And Molly’s voice, loud and in command again, but with a permanent note of challenging query, of pain defied, would reply: “Anna, it’s all so odd I don’t know what to say or do. He just stays in that room, working away, always quiet; and when I can’t stand it another moment I go in, and he looks up and says: ‘Well mother, and what can I do for you?’” “Yes, I know.” “So naturally I say something silly, like—I thought you might like a cup of tea. Usually he says no, very politely of course, so I go out again. And now he’s learning to make his own tea and coffee. Even to cook.” “He’s handling kettles and things?” “Yes. I’m petrified. I have to go out of the kitchen, because he knows what I am feeling, and he says, Mother, there’s no need to be frightened, I’m not going to burn myself.” “Well Molly I don’t know what to say.” (Here there was a silence, because of what they were both afraid to say.) Then Molly went on: “And people come up, oh ever so sweet and kind, you know?” “Yes, indeed I do.” “Your poor son, your unfortunate Tommy…I always knew everything was a jungle, but never as clearly as I do now.” Anna understood this because mutual friends and acquaintances used her as a target for the remarks, on the surface kindly, but concealing malice, which they would have liked to direct at Molly. “Of course it was a pity that Molly went off and left the boy for that year.” “I don’t think that had anything to do with it. Besides, she did it after careful thought.” Or: “Of course, there was that broken marriage. It must have affected Tommy more than anyone guessed.” “Oh quite so,” Anna would say, smiling. “And there’s my broken marriage. I do so trust that Janet won’t end up the same way.” And all the time, while Anna defended Molly, and herself, there was something else, the cause of the panic they both felt, the something they were afraid to say.
It was expressed by the single fact that whereas not six months before she, Anna, rang Molly’s home to chat with Molly, sending messages to Tommy; visited Molly, and perhaps dropped into Tommy’s room for a chat; went to Molly’s parties at which Tommy was a guest, among others; was a participant in Molly’s life, her adventures with men, her need, and her failure to marry—now all this, the years’ long, slow growth of intimacy was checked and broken. Anna never telephoned Molly except for the most practical reasons, because even if the telephone had not been outside Tommy’s door, he was able to intuit what was said by people apparently through a new sixth sense. For instance, once Richard, who was still aggressively accusing, telephoned Molly saying: “Answer yes or no, that’s all that’s necessary: I want to send Tommy off on a holiday with a trained blind-nurse. Will he go?” And before Molly could even reply, Tommy raised his voice from the room inside with: “Tell my father that I’m quite all right. Thank him and say I’ll telephone him tomorrow.”
No longer did Anna visit Molly casually and lightly for an evening, or drop in when going past. She rang the door-bell after a preparatory telephone call, heard it vibrate upstairs, and was convinced that Tommy already knew who it was. The door opened on Molly’s shrewd, painful, still forcibly gay smile. They went up to the kitchen, speaking of neutral matters, conscious of the boy through the wall. The tea or the coffee would be made; and a cup offered to Tommy. He always refused. The two women went up to the room that had been Molly’s bedroom, and was now a sort of bed-sitting-room. There they sat, thinking in spite of themselves of the mutilated boy just below them, who was now the centre of the house, dominating it, conscious of everything that went on in it, a blind but all-conscious presence. Molly would chatter a little, offer theatre gossip, from habit. Then she fell silent, her mouth twisted in anxiety, her eyes reddened with checked tears. She had now the tendency to burst suddenly and without warning into tears—on a word, in the middle of a sentence, helpless and hysterical tears which she instantly checked. Her life had changed completely. She now went to the theatre to work, shopped for what was necessary, then came home and sat alone in the kitchen or in her bed-sitting-room.
“Aren’t you seeing anybody?” Anna asked.
“Tommy asked me that. Last week he said: ‘I don’t want you to stop your social life, just for me, mother. Why don’t you bring your friends home?’ Well so I took him at his word. And so I brought home that producer, you know, the one that wanted to marry me. Dick. You remember? Well he’s been very sweet over Tommy—I mean really sweet and kind, not spiteful. And I was sitting here with him, and we were drinking some Scotch. And for the first time I thought, well I wouldn’t mind—he is kind, and I’d settle tonight for just a kind masculine shoulder. And I was on the point of flashing the green light, and then I realised—it wouldn’t be possible for me to give him so much as a sisterly kiss without Tommy knowing it. Though of course Tommy would never hold it against me, would he? In the morning he would very likely have said, Did you have a pleasant evening, mother? I’m so glad.”
&nb
sp; Anna stopped an impulse to say: You’re exaggerating. Because Molly was not exaggerating, and she could not offer this sort of dishonesty to Molly. “So you know, Anna, when I look at Tommy, with that ghastly black thing over his eyes—you know, all neat and tidy, and his mouth—you know that mouth of his, set, dogmatic…I get suddenly so irritated…” “Yes, I can understand.” “But isn’t it awful? I get physically irritated. Those slow careful movements, you know.” “Yes.” “Because the point is, it’s like he was before, only—confirmed, if you know what I mean.” “Yes.” “Like some kind of zombie.” “Yes.” “I could scream with irritation. And the thing is, I have to leave the room because I know quite well he knows I’m feeling like that and…” She stopped herself. Then she made herself go on, defiantly: “He enjoys it.” She gave a high yelp of laughter, and said: “He’s happy, Anna.” “Yes.” Now it was out at last, they both felt easier. “He’s happy for the first time in his life. That’s what’s so terrible…you can see it in how he moves and talks—he’s all in one piece for the first time in his life.” Molly gasped in horror at her own words, hearing what she had said: all in one piece, and matching them against the truth of that mutilation. Now she put her face in her hands and wept, differently, through her whole body. When she had finished crying, she looked up and said, trying to smile: “I oughtn’t to cry. He’ll hear me.” There was gallantry in that smile even now.