WHEN THE HOUSE was deserted, it was much quieter than her house in Stoke Newington. Traffic was sparse; the passing cars were well-serviced and full of children.
Honor had nothing to do. No household task, no research to complete, no errands she was able to run. Before she had gone out, Jo had brought her a flask of tea, a plate of biscuits and another plate of sandwiches, covered with cling film, accompanied by an apple and a banana. They all sat, untouched, on the small table near the comfortable yet not too soft armchair that Jo had also arranged for her specially. She had also arranged a grabber – a sort of pincer at the end of a stick, controlled by a handle. It was to allow Honor to pick up things without getting out of her chair, or bending down.
This was the radius of her world: what she could see from the edges of her eyes, what she could reach with the end of a stick.
Honor stood and walked with her cane out of her bedroom into the empty house. She had carefully flushed all of her pain medication down the toilet in the ensuite. The pain was bearable, or she would make herself bear it; the doctor had assured her that it would abate, day by day, as her wounds healed. He had also told her to be as active as possible. ‘You want to use that joint to strengthen it, even though it will be hard at first. Only be careful – we don’t want you falling again!’
The condescending ‘we’. At least Jo didn’t use that particular construction. Honor was more grateful for that than the room, or the grabber, or the carefully prepared food.
She made her way across the slippery floor, using the cane, across the kitchen to the door leading to the garage. Here in the semi-darkness, in the scent of oil and concrete, in the open space abandoned by the too-large car, was something else she was presumably meant to be grateful for. In the shadows it hunkered like a large clumsy insect, a misshapen beetle perhaps.
It had arrived this morning, in the back of a van that beeped as it reversed into the gravel drive, and Jo and the children had harried Honor outside to marvel at it.
‘Scooter!’ Oscar had cried, jumping up and down, running with that never-ending supply of energy. ‘It’s a scooter, Ganny H! And it’s purple!’
The sunshine was dazzling; Honor could see squat wheels, a flash of purple. ‘You got me a mobility scooter?’
‘I thought it would be useful, and it would give you more independence,’ said Jo. ‘You can go to the shopping precinct, run your own errands. I mean I can drive you, of course, but if you wanted to do it yourself.’
‘How much does one of these cost?’
‘I rented it. You can have them by the week. It’s not as good as your bicycle, but …’
‘I’m not certain that this is—’ Honor was surprised to feel a small cool hand slip into hers. Oscar tugged her towards the scooter. ‘Come and ride it, Ganny H!’ At a loss as to what else to do, she went with him. ‘This is the seat here,’ he told her, pointing. ‘And this is the start button. Can I press it?’
‘No, Oscar, it’s Granny Honor’s scooter, not for little boys,’ said Jo.
Honor could not see the start button, but Oscar, impatiently, put her hand on it. ‘Press it!’ he insisted, so she did. The scooter came to buzzing, vibrating life. Oscar whooped in delight. ‘I want a ride!’ he cried.
She shut it off. Oscar made a disappointed noise.
‘I’ll put it in the garage for now,’ said Jo, cheerfully, but Honor could hear her disappointment. Yet another thing Jo had done that Honor was meant to appreciate, and did not.
Now, hours later and alone, Honor approached it. She put her hand on its smooth carapace. For a moment she thought about getting on it, pressing the button. Trundling out onto the pavements of Woodley and somehow, guided by intuition perhaps, making her way at four miles per hour, metre by metre, down Keats Way, across Tennyson Street, out of the regimented blocks of suburbia to the jumbled streets of London, back to her home. There had been a film about that, hadn’t there? An elderly person taking their destiny into their own hands.
She snorted. She was not an inspirational film. She was a woman. Once she had been a daughter, an academic, a lover, a reader, a mother. Object of pity, object of desire, subject of scorn.
Now none of those. Only a woman. Another old lady. Useless, irrelevant and invisible. This scooter did not give her freedom; it represented her limits.
It also meant that Jo had not guessed her secret.
It had started nearly a year ago, when the words began to jump.
She had been reading a sentence and it shifted on the page. A word leaped, changed position, suddenly higher than it had been before.
She retraced her reading – back to the beginning of the sentence, reassuringly solid and black next to the white margin, and started again. And in the same place, the sentence bucked up, as if it had become detached from the page, as if it had become capricious.
And then the word after, and the word after, until the tail end, the right margin, when the words lay still again. She tried the next line, which lay still near the margin, and then jumped in the middle, mid-phrase. Again, on the next line, the next paragraph, the next page.
She put down her book and rested her eyes, rubbing her forehead. It was evening and she was lying in her bed with the reading lamp on. It was a hardback edition of Anna Karenina. The pages were soft from the touch of her fingers. With her eyes closed she could visualize the page she had just tried to read. She could see the sentence that had moved, as it should be, rock-solid and reassuring. If she opened the book on her lap, she would be able to put her finger on it without even looking, because words did not move. Their meanings might shift with time and experience, translation and context, literary theory and fashion.
But words themselves did not judder on the page like clumsy dancers.
For her entire life she had read whilst walking. Physical movement helped her think. She enjoyed reading as a passenger in a car or a train or an aeroplane. She had occasionally opened a book and snatched phrases from it whilst she was riding her bicycle, steering with her knees, listening for obstacles.
She liked the feeling of the world moving around her whilst her words stayed solid and safe and true.
Honor thought of the sentence she had been reading: They have no conception of what happiness is, and they do not know that without love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us, for there would be no life. She opened the book and put her finger on it by feel, without looking. She pictured the sentence in her mind.
When she opened her eyes, the words danced.
After this first tremor she carried on reading for several months, regardless. With a book she knew well, it was less of a problem; the words at the edges around the margin stayed obediently still, ranks of reliable soldiers, and she could predict the meaning of the dancing middle, even if she couldn’t quite catch the words. But a new book was impossible to understand. Meaning became slippery, syntax distorted. Distracted by movement, she couldn’t follow a sentence she had started.
Honor knew what was causing it. Thirty-five years before, she had seen her father put down his newspaper and rub his forehead; she had noticed him, a man who’d always taken the greatest care with his appearance, missing spots when he shaved, tying his tie askance. She had suggested a change in the prescription of his glasses, and she and Stephen had walked with him to the optometrist – to help him choose new frames, she said. Really it was because she knew that her father wouldn’t pass on what he’d been told. Levinsons were not fond of doctors.
So she was there to hear her father’s description of what he saw: It’s all hazy in the middle, and sometimes it jumps.
She was also there to watch the optometrist administer tests, and to hear the diagnosis. Thirty-five years had not dulled her memory of the horror, for a man who had worked with his hands, who had recognized faces, lived in the same community, gone to the same shul for all of his life, who measured rope and chain and nails and screws by eye, who knew everyone by sight.
And now here Honor was, thirty-five years later, older than her father had been when he had begun to go blind. And her world was all hazy in the middle, and it jumped.
A computer screen was no better than a book, but she had Googled it anyway and though the text seemed to scroll itself, she found out everything she needed to know. Macular degeneration, a progressive destroying of the pigments of the retina, which manifested as a haziness in the centre of vision, followed by eventual blackness that destroyed everything directly in front of you.
Incurable, inevitable, inherited.
The words jumped because her peripheral vision was better than her direct vision, and she was moving her head to catch them. They weren’t shifting; she was. The centre of her sight was melting away, like a piece of paper held over a candle.
There was nothing she could do to slow it or to prevent it. So she chained up her bicycle and shelved her books and put away all the parts of herself that relied on seeing. Except for her years at Oxford, she had lived in her house since she was a child and she knew it by feel and touch, smell and hearing.
But then she’d mis-stepped. She’d fallen.
And now here she was in a house she did not know, and she had to hide the hole in her seeing.