mechanic) who also stopped abruptly.
Then in a talking voice which sounded strange unaccompanied, —Take out your silent reading books.
So I remember this. And why not, in the land of Proust: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure .
And so, also, day after day, the alterations continued. Unable to work in the Memorial Room or the small villa, I spent my time roaming between the two, and hoping before I reached one, then the other, that I would find the retreat and silence I told myself I needed in order to think and write.
One day, a new stove, with a see-through oven, warming drawer, thermostatic control, light control and so on, was installed. Then I’d walk to the Memorial Room and sit in the tangled garden listening to the chuckling birds who knew about everything. Then I’d return to the villa to find workmen drilling holes in the wall to put in power points.
—Oh, we must have new power points. We haven’t enough power, they cried, who were effectively controlling my every move.
Another day – new cutlery, new plates, a new set of cups. A hot water cylinder, a new bath, a new reading lamp.
—You will want for nothing, they said.
I still had not told them of my prospective blindness; perhaps I did not myself believe it, for I had had a kind of obsession about blindness for many years, and even in my first two historical novels I took care to have at least one character (not fictional) who was blind; I tended, at times, to look on my preoccupation with blindness as an artistic device, like the blind man in a Greek play, or the old man or the fool in Shakespeare: the frenzied blind man who waves his stick and shouts, because he senses it, the danger that lies ahead. Even my parents – and my father a doctor, too – looked on my recent problems with my eyes as something that would ‘pass’. No one in our family has been blind. They tend to deafness. Again, I was following a convention in not concerning myself with deafness, for even though a hearing aid may be visible, deafness has an infuriating secrecy about it, and it is harder to identify with the deaf; it is easier to make them the subject of humour, to make their comic mishearing of speech into a satire on human communication; and, as those who are disabled tend to do, they use the power which they find in their disability to surround themselves with an antidote to endearment. A hearing aid arouses less sympathy than a white walking-stick. In a way, by turning to blindness, or being directed towards it, I was following a similar path to those around me whom I was beginning to condemn both for their romantic notions of writers living and dead and for their uncontrollable desires to seek shelter and permanence in the dead and the work of the dead. Being in France, I was reminded of the scene from Victor Hugo’s ‘The Retreat from Moscow’ where those who were victorious simply by their being alive could remain alive only if they sought shelter from the blizzard by creeping within the bloated hollows of the dead horses.
A fancy, certainly, to talk of Rose Hurndell as a horse, but I had seen her described as one, and written of as one, by a poet who had known her. ‘And there was a horse in the King’s stables: and the name of the horse was, GENIUS’, was his prefaced quote from The Arabian Nights .
There came a time when the alterations were being made everywhere except in the small solarium-corridor between the bathroom and the top of the stairs. I could close the door to the stairs, the door to the bathroom and the door to the kitchen and still have enough light from the glass skylight which was the only roof above me. I moved my desk there, fitting it against two of the three wall-cupboards, which I used as a linen cupboard and spare wardrobe. Oh no, I did not make this arrangement openly. If I had, my kind hosts would immediately have decided upon an alteration for the only space which they had neglected to plan for. There I worked
Then in a talking voice which sounded strange unaccompanied, —Take out your silent reading books.
So I remember this. And why not, in the land of Proust: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure .
And so, also, day after day, the alterations continued. Unable to work in the Memorial Room or the small villa, I spent my time roaming between the two, and hoping before I reached one, then the other, that I would find the retreat and silence I told myself I needed in order to think and write.
One day, a new stove, with a see-through oven, warming drawer, thermostatic control, light control and so on, was installed. Then I’d walk to the Memorial Room and sit in the tangled garden listening to the chuckling birds who knew about everything. Then I’d return to the villa to find workmen drilling holes in the wall to put in power points.
—Oh, we must have new power points. We haven’t enough power, they cried, who were effectively controlling my every move.
Another day – new cutlery, new plates, a new set of cups. A hot water cylinder, a new bath, a new reading lamp.
—You will want for nothing, they said.
I still had not told them of my prospective blindness; perhaps I did not myself believe it, for I had had a kind of obsession about blindness for many years, and even in my first two historical novels I took care to have at least one character (not fictional) who was blind; I tended, at times, to look on my preoccupation with blindness as an artistic device, like the blind man in a Greek play, or the old man or the fool in Shakespeare: the frenzied blind man who waves his stick and shouts, because he senses it, the danger that lies ahead. Even my parents – and my father a doctor, too – looked on my recent problems with my eyes as something that would ‘pass’. No one in our family has been blind. They tend to deafness. Again, I was following a convention in not concerning myself with deafness, for even though a hearing aid may be visible, deafness has an infuriating secrecy about it, and it is harder to identify with the deaf; it is easier to make them the subject of humour, to make their comic mishearing of speech into a satire on human communication; and, as those who are disabled tend to do, they use the power which they find in their disability to surround themselves with an antidote to endearment. A hearing aid arouses less sympathy than a white walking-stick. In a way, by turning to blindness, or being directed towards it, I was following a similar path to those around me whom I was beginning to condemn both for their romantic notions of writers living and dead and for their uncontrollable desires to seek shelter and permanence in the dead and the work of the dead. Being in France, I was reminded of the scene from Victor Hugo’s ‘The Retreat from Moscow’ where those who were victorious simply by their being alive could remain alive only if they sought shelter from the blizzard by creeping within the bloated hollows of the dead horses.
A fancy, certainly, to talk of Rose Hurndell as a horse, but I had seen her described as one, and written of as one, by a poet who had known her. ‘And there was a horse in the King’s stables: and the name of the horse was, GENIUS’, was his prefaced quote from The Arabian Nights .
There came a time when the alterations were being made everywhere except in the small solarium-corridor between the bathroom and the top of the stairs. I could close the door to the stairs, the door to the bathroom and the door to the kitchen and still have enough light from the glass skylight which was the only roof above me. I moved my desk there, fitting it against two of the three wall-cupboards, which I used as a linen cupboard and spare wardrobe. Oh no, I did not make this arrangement openly. If I had, my kind hosts would immediately have decided upon an alteration for the only space which they had neglected to plan for. There I worked
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