Free With My Little Eye by Francis King Page A

rose to my feet. She remained seated, still staring at the stage. She moved her head a fraction so that a light above us caught her cheekbone. It glistened. Unconscious of my gaze, she raised a hand and with it wiped her cheek. I realised that she had been crying. I was astonished. How had she been able, without even a glance at the English text, to recognise the pathos of a piece of which she had previously known nothing and of which she had been able to understand not a single word?
    All she would stay as we stepped out into the teeming rain was, ‘Well, that got to me. It really got to me.’
    Had that remote, highly formalised drama prompted in her a prescience of what was so soon to follow?

(13)
    I have come to hate the bloated, red-faced boor opposite. I have also come to hate myself for hating him. He has a jocular way of baiting an old toff like me but he is never hostile and often, in his crude, clumsy way, he even tries to be friendly. I ought to feel sorry for him, afflicted, to his patent embarrassment , with what he mysteriously calls ‘one of those women’s things’. (I shrink from pressing him to tell me what that can be.) Occasionally I do feel sorry for him, but there is always this unyielding substratum of hate, hate, hate. The fact that, as I watch him across the aisle, it is with my little eye as though through a telescope, only gives a sharper focus and intensity to my hate.
    As I brood on his awfulness, Laura is suddenly clicking her way towards me. This is her second visit today. The post, always late now, had not arrived when she made her visit this morning and so she decided that she would bring it now. I am moved both by the frequency with which she appears beside my bed – suddenly there since, unless my head is turned, my little eye does not take in her approach – and by her obvious concern for me. This concern drives her to interrogate the nurses and even, on one occasion, Dr Szymanovski’s Scottish assistant, who happened to be hurrying past. I suspect that the staff think and even say among themselves, ‘Oh, that woman again!’ They are all, as they often complain, rushed off their feet.
    Today it is a large packet of letters that she removes from her bag. She looks unusually pale and, as she takes a step towards me, holding it out, her limp is so pronounced that I think for a panicky moment that she is going to fall. ‘I’ve removed what seems to be junk. Lots of bills. I’ve dealt with those. I thought you’d want to see the letter from Joe.’ Instead of handing it to me, she now begins to shuffle the pack as she looks for the airmail envelope that bears Joe’s meticulous, minute writing of our address.
    ‘Read it now if you like.’
    ‘Later.’
    In saying that, I have disappointed her. There has never been any urgency in my interest in Joe, any more than there has been any in his interest in me. From the beginning I tried to love him with the protective ferocity with which I loved Mark. But I could never achieve that.
    ‘He’s always so busy.’
    She is making excuses for him. Since my stroke, he has telephoned once to ask how I am, and there has been a get-well card signed by him, his wife and one of their three daughters, the youngest, still living with them in Auckland. I met that daughter first as a child, when they brought her with them on a holiday visit to England, and then again as an awkward, enthusiastic teenager, when Laura had persuaded me that we must travel on to New Zealand after she had accompanied me to Australia on a lecture tour.
    ‘Yes. It’s extraordinary that someone should devote so much of his time to linguistics, of all things.’
    ‘Is that any more extraordinary than devoting so much of one’s time to Japanese art?’ For all our years together, more than half a century now, her constant complaint has been that she ‘just can’t get ’ Japanese art. Once she even remarked of it, ‘You always say that it’s a miracle of less meaning