Chapter 5. Free Women 3

Tommy Adjusts Himself to Being Blind While the Older People Try to Help Him

Tommy hovered for a week between life and death. The end of that week was marked by Molly’s use of these words; her voice very far from its usual note of ringing confidence: ‘Isn’t it odd, Anna? He’s been hovering between life and death. Now he’s going to live. It seems impossible he shouldn’t. But if he had died, then I suppose we’d have felt that was inevitable too?’ For a week the two women had sat by Tommy’s bed in the hospital; waited in side-rooms while doctors conferred, judged, operated; returned to Anna’s flat to care for Janet; received letters and visits of sympathy; and called on their reserves of energy to deal with Richard, who was openly condemning them both. During this week, while time stopped, and feeling stopped (they asked themselves and each other why they felt nothing but numbing and suspense, although of course tradition authorized this reaction), they talked, though briefly and in shorthand, so to speak, since the points in question were so familiar to them both, of Molly’s care of Tommy, Anna’s relationship with him, to pinpoint the event or the moment when they had definitely failed him. Because Molly had gone away for a year? No, she still felt that was the right thing to have done. Because of the formlessness of their own lives? But how could they have been anything different? Because of something said or not said during Tommy’s last visit to Anna? Possibly, but they felt not; and how was one to know? They did not refer the catastrophe to Richard’s account; but when he accused them, replied: ‘Look, Richard, there’s no point in abusing each other. The thing is, what to do next for him?’

Tommy’s optic nerve was damaged; he would be blind. The brain was undamaged, or at least, would recover.

Now that he was pronounced out of danger, time established itself again, and Molly collapsed into hours of low and helpless weeping. Anna was very busy with her and with Janet, who had to be shielded from the knowledge that Tommy had tried to kill himself. She had used the phrase: ‘— had an accident’, but it was a stupid one, because now she could see in the child’s eyes the knowledge that the possibilities of an accident terrible enough to lay one flat on one’s back, permanently blinded, in hospital, lurked in the objects and habits of an every day. So Anna amended the phrase and said Tommy had accidentally wounded himself cleaning a revolver. Janet then remarked that there was no revolver in their flat; and Anna said no, and there never would be, etc.; and the child came out of her anxiety.