Sight

  All morning in the library I would sit at my desk, flicking through contents pages and indexes, appendices, photo captions, chapter headings, following this lead or that a little way until I became distracted or until it was time for lunch, a slice of quiche or tart and a salad in the library cafe, and then often in the afternoons I would give up even that pretence of activity, setting a book to lie open in front of me, the pages rustling softly in the breeze from the open window, and allow myself to drift through the brackish backwaters of the afternoon, the roar of traffic from the road outside a lulling constancy. I stayed each day until the library was almost closed, until the assistant librarians came round with their trolleys to pick up that day’s cast-off texts and until the sound of a hoover started up in a distant corridor; and then at the last possible moment, dragging my feet, I would dawdle back out into the street—and although at the time the sound of pages turning seemed to grind against me until I worried that I might be worn away by it to nothing, now I recall that long summer as though it had been spent within the papery confines of a cocoon. I had been reduced to nothing, and now I sought amongst so many books a way to understand myself by analogy, a pattern recognised in other lives which might be drawn across my own to give it shape and, given shape, to give it impetus, direction. The things which I learned without noticing all through that year recur to me still, those images from medical textbooks, the bodies dissected or described, the case notes and the cabinets and all the many ways there are to see inside ourselves, and still I feel that, correctly understood, they might constitute a key—

  Each evening when the library shut I walked home, an hour’s steady, thoughtless progress through the evening streets with their clots of drinkers outside pubs, their newspaper sellers and fruit stalls, skirting north through the decaying Georgian streets above King’s Cross towards the gentility of Islington’s garden squares and then down onto the towpath to walk along the canal into Hackney. On one side of me, small brown fish darted between drowned carrier bags and bicycle wheels lay submerged in three feet and six inches of slow water, and on the other, beyond a tangle of vegetation, clumps of catmint mixed with goosegrass, lavender with dandelions, a peculiar combination of intention and neglect, rose the solid, damp Victorian brick wall that sheltered the canal, in its sunken bed, from the city beyond. It was cooler down there, with the water and the shade, than it was above, where the city had spent all day absorbing heat and now let it go, the pavements shimmering slightly in the dusk. In that narrow passageway left over from an older iteration of the familiar city I felt that I could breathe again, and as Haggerston gave onto London Fields and the sharp striations of gentility and grime above the towpath began to meld into a kind of uniform grubbiness, when darkness was beginning to spread through the evening air like ink, I felt at last a brief alleviation of my disconnection from myself and for a quarter of an hour, before I reached the steps which led back up to road level and the entrance to my building, everything else fell away, and for that short stretch I felt only what I was: young, adrift, bereft.

  * * *

  —

  At Johannes’ suggestion I spent a weekend by myself, staying in a tiny stone-walled cottage in a valley near Hay-on-Wye. It might, he said, help me to think. Perhaps without him there I might feel less pressure to articulate what was on my mind and might instead be able to concentrate, and so might find myself able at last to come to a decision. He kissed my cheek and said

  —Whatever you decide will be all right,

  and I tried not to append my own clauses: that he wished only that I might decide, one way or the other, because he had begun to find my indecision intolerable; but Johannes was not so unkind. It was only I who felt the pressure—the pronged implement which caught me was wholly of my own devising. Sometimes, when I saw a woman in a cafe pick up a baby from a pram, I felt a weight in my own arms, a heaviness where nothing was, and the force of my longing for a child was such that I had to turn away but still I could only feel how impossible it was that I should ever manage such uncomplicated love. I took the train to Hereford and then the bus to Hay and from there I walked, my rucksack heavy with provisions, the few miles further into Wales to where the cottage was, its windows facing down the long corrugation of the valley. There was a tiny garden with a bench, a handkerchief of lawn, an apple tree, a single bedroom with a sloping ceiling and an iron bedstead. Arriving, putting cheese on toast under the grill and pouring myself a glass of wine, I thought that in such a place, so simplified, I couldn’t fail to find a way to think, but thinking without context is a near impossible activity. I tried to focus my mind, sitting down at the kitchen table half-drunk to write a list of pros and cons, but the effort was ludicrous and I only felt ashamed; instead I drank more and read my way along the shelf of detective novels that sat beside the bed. I missed Johannes desperately. While at home I often felt that my love for him was intangible, out of reach, an emergent quality that I struggled to locate amongst the objects which filled our lives, the dirty dishes and the small change for the window cleaner, the arrangements for visits to his mother’s house, the constant flow of words on minute variations of domestic trivia; but without him I could feel nothing else, love filling the space his absence made, and I wished I could go home, leave the green serenity that I had longed for and return to our dishevelled, smog-blackened house—wished, even, that I could return to the complicated discontent the last six months had been, if only it would mean his hands, his voice; but he had sent me here and how could I return without reaching a conclusion—and anyway I would walk back through the door and all this certainty of love would fade behind the unwashed windows and the unbought milk to the usual chafing familiarity with one another. I sat the week out, unhappy, and went home to tell him with defiance that I wouldn’t have a child; but two days later I cried and said that after all I might, because still I could feel nothing but how much I wanted to.

  * * *

  —

  As August failed into September the year after my mother died I began to suffer from headaches, near-migraines which were unlike anything I have experienced either before or since. For months I had drifted further and further away from myself. The faces of strangers caught sight of in the street, or on the opposite escalator as each morning I descended into the station to make my journey to the library, appeared familiar, rising suddenly out of the jumble like friends I had forgotten, their likenesses caught and lost again. The line between recognisable and unrecognisable blurred and the world appeared fragile, glassy and flat, so that I felt that it might shatter if I touched it, falling to my feet in shards to reveal whatever solidity was hidden underneath. Sounds—the grind of traffic, the voice of a man calling from a doorway, a radio spilling outwards from a windowsill—were both muted and precise, as if they were passing through some medium more viscous than air, but the pain of my headaches was something different again. I was incapacitated by it for days at a time, prostrate on my bed with the blinds pulled down and the curtains drawn across them, pain turning the passing of days and nights into the ticks of an excruciating clock, indefatigable and cruel. I felt as though there was something swelling inside my skull, an abscess filling slowly with whatever stuff unhappiness is made of, its edges pressing against the bone like mud against stone, extruding into my sinuses, my eye-sockets, squeezing through my tear ducts and down my throat. Sometimes, at night, when exhaustion would briefly overcome pain and I would pass into a fitful doze at last, then I would dream that my mouth was filled with something like wet sand, a claggy, white substance which regenerated as fast as I could spit it out or excavate it with my fingers from the space between my gum and cheek; and waking I would have the taste of it still, the lingering memory of something like rotten milk catching in my throat.

  Afterwards, as the pain receded, I would feel weak and new, a beach scoured clean and still unmarked, and I would lie on sheets stiffened with sweat and watch the dust motes fall slowly throug
h the light which slanted down between a gap in the curtains, feeling the tiny chill of each indrawn breath, and I would wait until I had the strength to totter to the kitchen and pour a glass of water from the tap, lifting it with both hands to my mouth to feel it run into me, and it would be as though I had been reduced to almost nothing, my skin a fragile membrane parting light and liquid. Beforehand, though, in the days leading up to an attack, I would feel glorified. For twenty-four hours I seemed to glow, my body’s radiance reflected back to me from every surface of the world to be reabsorbed and retransmitted, a refiner’s fire which sharpened as it grew, and I was ecstatic. I teetered on the brink of visions. Revelation pended, the veil between myself and understanding was in a constant state of almost-rending, and I thought I could see shadows through it, the outlines of an as-yet uncomprehended truth, until all at once the mania crested and what came out of it, in place of elucidation, was agony, my head pinned in a vice, my body hanging limp below it, a disarticulated sack of bones and blood around which my limbs curled, stiff and liable to snap. Still, though, for almost two months I did nothing. After each attack the memory of pain was erased, but I could recall clearly how it had felt to be so enraptured and how the aftermath had been, that hollow peace that was so much like resurrection, and I wondered if it might be worth it. At other times, as the pain began and brought with it the certainty that nothing could be recompense for this, I was afraid, sure now that there was something really wrong with me and not wanting to know what it was, so that it wasn’t until the period of these cycles had shortened to leave barely space between them to restock the fridge and wash and dry the bed sheets in preparation for the next headache, that I finally made an appointment to see a doctor.

  * * *

  —

  Bertha Röntgen was used to lost hours, to her husband’s absorption in his work which kept him away from home or returned him only in part, his mind elsewhere across the dinner table or as they sat with the fire between them in the drawing room where the piano was; still, though, even she began to worry as, by mid-November 1895, he had taken to sleeping in his laboratory, to taking his meals there, returning to the house only to wash and change his clothes while Bertha watched him, trying hard to keep both concern and curiosity in check. Later, Röntgen would try to diminish what these weeks had been. He would seem to feel keenly Philipp Lenard’s attempts to discredit him, the rumours muttered from the sides of mouths that his achievement had been nothing but an accumulation of serendipity. Even the speed with which his friends came to support him was felt as accusation—the suggestion left open by their quick defence that there were charges to be answered. “It is almost,” he would write some years later, “as though I had to apologise for discovering the rays”—and by late spring he would have done all the work on X-rays that he would ever undertake, publishing three papers and giving a single lecture. Such was his determination to avoid the subject that when, in 1901, he was awarded the inaugural Nobel Prize for Physics he declined to speak; but, whatever he might have come to feel afterwards, on the subject of those few weeks his own words betray him. The account of his work that he gives in Über Eine Neue Art von Strahlen, written hastily through the scrag-end of December to meet the Physical Medical Society’s deadline, is a description cried aloud while still in flight, an account of actions performed while hours slipped past like river water, while the world remade itself in front of him, its solid surfaces dissolved to offer up their innards to his gaze; and the speed with which he wrote it, his figure running through the frozen Würzburg streets, is an indicator of his awareness of how fragile was his claim to priority and how much, reflexively perhaps but certainly, he wanted it. While Bertha sat in an empty house and tried to keep her worries to herself, Röntgen in his laboratory reached for whatever was to hand, to hold it up in front of his machine. “I have,” he wrote, “observed and photographed many…shadow pictures. Thus, I have the outline of a door covered with lead paint; the image was produced by placing the discharge tube on one side of the door, and the sensitive plate on the other. I have also a shadow of the bones of the hand; of a wire upon a bobbin; of a set of weights in a box; of a compass card and needle completely enclosed in a metal case; of a piece of metal where the X-rays show the want of homogeneity…” For seven weeks and three days Röntgen existed in a private world transformed for him and him alone, and perhaps this too was a part of his later bitterness: that despite this experience of revelation, the conferral on him of a scientific grace, afterwards nothing was different at all, and although he had seen through metal and seen through flesh to what was hidden, and although he had known, or thought that he had known, its nature, what had been left afterwards was only so much quibbling at the bill.

  At last, on 22 December 1895, Röntgen broke his run of solitude. Returning home he found Bertha, who for weeks had been his placeholder, moving through the routine business of their lives to keep the edges of it taut on his behalf, and he asked her to come with him. Without questioning she put on her coat and gloves, and together they walked through the winter streets and then through the university, their footsteps echoing in its empty corridors, until at last they reached the door of his laboratory, and Röntgen opened it and pushed her through. For a few minutes, while Bertha stood, uncomfortable in this space which belonged to a version of her husband she knew only by reputation, he moved about, making sure of his equipment; and then without flourish he turned out the light and laid his wife’s hand on a photographic plate. Bertha stayed still, doing as he asked of her, while he prepped the Crookes tube and shot the current across it, her hand an object sat between them in the darkness. It took ten minutes for Röntgen to develop the picture, the only sounds his footsteps and the ticking of the regulator clock which hung on the wall above them, and then it was done and, the lights on again, they looked at it, this picture which has become Bertha’s enduring image: her skeletal hand, open, fingers curved above the convex length of her palm. Across the lower phalange of her fourth finger Bertha’s wedding ring is an uncompromising mark, its blackness against the shadow of her bones a marker of the metal’s immutability. Röntgen, who for weeks had been alone in his newly understood world, had sought with this image Bertha’s admittance to it, the making of the picture a gesture of both initiation and affection: the tenderness of her bones made visible to them both, confirmation of the life which had formed such extraordinary structures; but these things are a matter of interpretation. To Bertha, whose hands were solid, whose body unitary, who had not doubted those things that constituted her—her skin, her thoughts; the single object that was flesh housing mind—nor sought to understand them, it had the chilly, soily smell of tombs.