Free With My Little Eye by Francis King Page B

more. But as far as I’m concerned it’s a catastrophe of less meaning even less.’
    I take her hand, in one of those sudden surges of love, a wave that sweeps in and then withdraws, leaving a cavernous darkness, that has, so puzzlingly to me and no doubt also to her, always characterised our relationship. ‘I can see you’ve been doing too much again. You look tired.’
    ‘Oh, it’s that bloody boiler. So many telephone calls, so many excuses. I wish we’d never taken out that contract. It’s almost three weeks since the whole problem started.’
    It is she who has always dealt with the practicalities of our life together.
    Abruptly I break out, ‘I do wish that this bloody trouble with my sight would clear!’
    ‘It won’t. You know it won’t. They’ve told you it won’t. It’s tough, but there it is. You’ll just have to adapt yourself.’
    It’s tough . You’re tough, I think. But I admire her for herrefusal ever to embrace an illusion or to encourage others to do so. Far more than most people, she will begin a sentence with ‘We’ve just got to face it.’ Now I just have to face it.
    When she says goodbye, leaning over to kiss me on one cheek and then the other, I put out my hands and pull her towards me. She all but topples over on top of me. ‘Oh, I do wish I were out of here. With you. Back home.’
    ‘It won’t be long. Be patient.’ She runs fingers through my sparse, grey hair. ‘I’ll come by tomorrow morning. But a little later than usual. That bloody plumber is coming at ten. If he comes.’ She moves off, raising a hand in farewell. Then she turns. ‘What about Smoky?’
    ‘Smoky?’
    ‘The ghost of Smoky. Is she still visiting?’
    ‘From time to time. Not as faithfully as you do.’
    As I speak, summoned as though by our talk of her, a grey shadow scuttles soundlessly across the ward and vanishes. I stare after it but say nothing.
    I pick up Joe’s letter and slit open the envelope with a knife forgotten by one of the two Polish sisters when she took away my tray.
    The letter begins ‘My Dear Dad.’ I hate that ‘Dad’. It used to be ‘Daddy’ and I hated that too. They have all, he writes, been so shocked and anxious since hearing the news of my stroke. It must be ghastly for me, with that restriction of vision, but it’s good news that I can write and read with no difficulty and can even watch television. He had so much wanted to fly over at once to be with me but unfortunately, with the examination season upon them, that was out of the question. Rosie would have come, in fact had almost done so, but in the end she had so much wanted to see her boyfriend row in his eight at the annual college regatta that, reluctantly and guiltily, she had given up on the idea. Erwin took his rowing so seriously and so she too had to take it seriously…
    Like all my letters to him, all his letters to me attempt to convey an abundance of love and concern when really there is little of either of those things. From the beginning, we mysteriously never really bonded, just as he and Laura never really bonded. Once, when I was reprimanding him, then only eight years old, for some trivial lapse in table manners, he had wailed,with an extraordinary passion, almost in tears, ‘You want me to be Mark. But I’m not Mark. I can’t be Mark. I don’t want to be Mark.’
    Stricken, Laura jumped up from the table and rushed round to put her arms about him. He shrank, as though she were about to slap him. ‘We don’t want you to be Mark, darling. We want you to be yourself. We love you as yourself.’
    But she was lying. And the recalcitrant, despairing, unattractive boy knew that she was lying, as I did.
    I cannot go on reading his letter, just as years ago I could not go on listening to him holding forth in wearisome periphrases and labyrinthine sentences each time that he returned home from Oxford for the vacation. I push it into the drawer of my bedside table. Tomorrow morning I’ll read