“Six months?”
“Dear boy, we must be practical. It may take a—a very long time indeed.”
“In fact, I shall be blind for life. Why didn’t you tell me at once? No, no, of course I understand.”
So he was blind.
She looks out of the window into the grey blur outside. Drops are having small races on the panes. The murmur fills the room with lazy sound. Now and then a drop falls from an eave to a sill, and sometimes a little cascade of drips patter down.
His heart is thumping, and there is a tightness in his throat, that’s all. She had not actually said that he was blind. It wasn’t he. All the same she hadn’t actually said—but he was blind. Blind. Would it always be black? No, it couldn’t. Poor Mamma, she must be upset about it all. What could be done? How dreadful if she started a scene while he was lying there in bed, helpless. But of course, he wasn’t blind. Besides, she hadn’t actually said. What had she said? But then she hadn’t actually said he wasn’t. What was it? He felt hot in bed, lost. He put out a hand, met hers, and drew it away quickly. He must say something. What? (Blind? Yes, blind.) But . . .
“We must be practical, John darling, we must run this together.”—Darling? She never used that. What was she saying? “. . . bicycles for two, tandems they’re called, aren’t they? Work together, let me do half the work like on a tandem bicycle. Your father and I went on a trip on one for our honeymoon, years ago now, when bicycles were the latest thing. I wish he was here now, he was a wonderful man, and he would have helped, and—and he would have known what to do.”
“What was he like?” (So he was blind, how funny.)
“Dear boy, he was the finest man to hounds in three counties, and the most lovely shot. I remember him killing fifty birds in sixty cartridges with driven grouse at your grandfather’s up in Scotland. A beautiful shot. He would have helped.”
“It’s all right, I guessed it all along, you see. I knew it really when the man was looking at me in what he said was darkness. There was something in his manner. Christ! my eyes hurt, though.”